Customer Experiences Affect Customer Loyalty: an Empirical Investigation of the Starbucks Experience Using Structural Equation Modeling

The study at hand investigates customer experiences at the American coffee company Starbucks and develops a new scale to measure customer experience quality on the basis of four dimensions: Service quality, atmosphere quality, flow quality and learning quality. The study reveals that product quality itself is a separate, but related construct to customer experience quality which alone is not sufficient to create customer loyalty. The effect of customer experience quality and product quality on customer loyalty intentions is found to be fully mediated by perceived value. Moreover, perceived wealth of the customer acts as a moderator and increases the positive effect of customer experience quality on perceived value whereas it weakens the effect of product quality on perceived value. Collectively, the results extend and clarify concepts in the evolving, but inconsistent customer experience management literature. The findings enable managers to stage customer experiences more effectively and more efficiently.