Abstract/Summary

Customer experience research is widely considered to be cutting edge. Despite this very little research has been conducted on the optimal online customer experience. Whilst some research has been conducted on the Business to Consumer Sector (B2C) there appears to be very little on Business to Business (B2B). Work conducted on behalf of the Henley Centre for Customer Management explored the perceptions of both B2B and B2C customers with online experience in both Europe and the United States. 132 people were interviewed in depth using a qualitative version of Repertory Grid. Over 100 hours of interview were analyzed. The research also adopted a cross industry approach as an aid to generalizability. We found 13 themes and 109 factors for the optimum B2C experience. Themes include; interactivity, security, informative, trustworthy, personal, community, emotional engagement, aesthetics, usability, quality of content, commercialization customer orientation, fulfilment. We found 13 themes and 97 factors for the optimum B2B experience. Themes; usability, aesthetics, subject relevance, hedonic experience, information processing, trustworthy, relational, learning, contemporary, customer oriented, community, commercialization, fulfilment. The report also contains a checklist of factors members should consider when crafting the optimum experience for their online customers.