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Understanding customer journey from the lenses of complexity theory

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 The Service Industries Journal

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Understanding customer journey from the lenses

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Kaan Varnali

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THE SERVICE INDUSTRIES JOURNAL, 2018
https://doi.org/10.1080/02642069.2018.1445725

Understanding customer journey from the lenses of

complexity theory
从复杂性理论的视角理解顾客之旅
Kaan Varnali
Department of Advertising, Istanbul Bilgi University, Istanbul, Turkey

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

The present article develops an argument that conceptualizing the Received 30 January 2018
customer journey as a complex system provides both a systematic Accepted 22 February 2018
portrayal of the complex and holistic nature of customer
KEYWORDS
experience and an opportunity to serve as an integrative Customer journey;
framework for differing definitions in the service literature. A complexity theory; customer
comprehensive literature review reflecting the contemporary experience; service design;
understanding of the concept of customer journey is presented. customer experience
Theoretical and practical implications of adopting a complexity management
theory-based stance in customer experience research are
discussed under five fundamental tenets of complexity theory. 关键词
客户旅程; 复杂性理论; 客
户体验; 服务设计; 客户体
摘要
验管理
本文提出了一个论点，即将顾客旅程概念化为一个复杂的系统，
既提供了对客户体验的复杂性和整体性的系统描述，又提供了可
能在服务文献中创新推动前行的一个机会即一个综合该领域不同
定义的框架的想法。本文的文献综述全面的介绍了反映当代理解
客户旅程的概念。在复杂性理论的五条基本原则下讨论了在客户
体验研究中采用基于复杂性理论的立场的理论和实践意义

As creating a strong customer experience becomes a bigger focus of corporate strategy,

understanding how it unfolds at individual contacts with customers and how these dis-
tinct experiential episodes come together to form the end-to-end journey experience is
now critical for firms (Bolton, Gustafsson, McColl-Kennedy, Sirianni, & Tse, 2014; Voorhees
et al., 2017; Zomerdijk & Voss, 2010). To meet this new challenge, firms now have executive
positions, such as chief customer experience officers, and independent business units
directly responsible for understanding and managing the experience of their customers.
Recognizing customers’ important role in the co-construction of experience (Aslanbay &
Varnali, 2014; Chandler & Lusch, 2015; Galvagno & Dalli, 2014; Gentile, Spiller, & Noci,
2007; Grönroos, 2011; Prahalad & Ramaswamy, 2003), management of customer experi-
ence primarily involves deconstruction of the holistic and complex experience into its
building blocks to analyze the specific causes of customers’ cognitive, affective, emotional,
social, and physical responses (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016; Schmitt, 2003; Verhoef et al., 2009).
Not a remotely easy task in this era of increasing media and channel fragmentation,

CONTACT Kaan Varnali kaan.varnali@bilgi.edu.tr Department of Advertising, Istanbul Bilgi University, 34060 Eyup,
Istanbul, Turkey
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 K. VARNALI

technology-enabled open innovation opportunities, and complex customer behavior

(Patrício, Fisk, Cunha, & Constantine, 2011; Teixeira et al., 2012).
‘Human rational behavior is shaped by a scissors whose blades are the structure of task
environment and the computational capabilities of the actor’ (Simon, 1990, p. 1). Simon’s
scissors metaphor suggests that probing into customer experience requires a thorough
analysis of both the immediate environment that surrounds an experiential episode and
the psyche of the person who is actively participating in the construction of the focal
experience by cognitively and emotionally interacting with this environment. Many
years of experience research strongly suggests that experiences are subjective, dynamic,
and context-dependent (Kahneman, Krueger, Schkade, Schwarz, & Stone, 2004; Voss,
Perks, Sousa, Witell, & Wünderlich, 2016). This notion is also widely accepted in the
service-dominant logic (Etgar, 2008; Vargo & Lusch, 2004, 2008, 2011). The experience
environment consists of many experiential elements (coined by the term service clues
by Berry, Wall, & Carbone, 2006) that are inherently subjective and must be understood
in relation to each specific time and place in which they occur (Lusch, Vargo, & O’Brien,
2007). Hence, a critical challenge in service design is to identify which of these elements
are the most critical to the customer segments being served?
The advent of big data analytics has contributed much to the ability of firms to parse
the experiential elements that drive economic value (Verhoef, Kooge, & Walk, 2016).
However, the power of data analytics in reflecting reality is bounded by the adequacy
of its data sources. Due to the complex nature of the service environment, it is difficult
to identify, quantify, and keep track of each and every experiential element that presum-
ably drives customer experience at the individual contact level (Zomerdijk & Voss, 2010).
Hence, the resulting models of customer experience often prove inadequate in predicting
future customer behavior, such as repurchase, revisit, referral, or changes in wallet share
(Wu, Yeh, Huan, & Woodside, 2014). The search for new methods that can capture and
depict more complex and rich elements that shape customer experience and the holistic
nature of the customer journey has already been started (e.g. Halvorsrud, Kvale, & Følstad,
2016; Patrício et al., 2011; Patrício, Fisk, & Cunha, 2008; Saffer, 2010; Smith, Karwan, & Mark-
land, 2007; Teixeira et al., 2012).
Driven by the increasing interest in service research, the field itself is emerging as a trans-
discipline with a unique focus on the evolution of service systems and value co-creation
(Gustafsson et al., 2016; Spohrer, Kwan, Fisk, Rust, & Huang, 2014). Due to the nascent
nature of the academic literature on customer experience using the rather new conceptual
metaphor of a journey, the domain has much to gain from fresh theoretical perspectives
(Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). Recognizing Gigerenzer’s (1991) dictum that tools-in-use influ-
ence theory formulation as well as data interpretation, a new perspective in the service-
dominant logic literature with a foundational footing on complexity theory is beginning
to emerge (e.g. Chang, Tseng, & Woodside, 2013; Woodside, 2013, 2014; Wu et al., 2014).
Standing upon and contributing to this emergent literature, the present article explains
how complexity theory provides a fruitful foundation to systematically describe the
complex nature of customer experience and advance our understanding of the concept
of customer journey. Specifically, the aim of the present article is to present a comprehen-
sive discussion on how to provide a tighter grip on both the diagnosis and the (re)design of
the end-to-end customer experience along a journey through rethinking the customer
journey as a complex non-linear system and applying the tenets of complexity theory.
 THE SERVICE INDUSTRIES JOURNAL 3

The Metaphor of Customer Journey

Today, both scholars and practitioners think holistically about customer experience, as a
journey that customers go through, that consists of customers’ cognitive, emotional,
sensory, social, and spiritual responses to all individual direct and indirect contacts with
a firm at distinct points in time, called touchpoints (Berry, Carbone, & Haeckel, 2002;
Homburg, Jozić, & Kuehnl, 2017; Lemke, Clark, & Wilson, 2011; Lemon & Verhoef, 2016;
Meyer & Schwager, 2007; Schmitt, 2003). Touchpoints can be conceptualized as clusters
of experiential elements that foster product or service experiences (Berry et al., 2006; Dub-
berly & Evenson, 2008; Zomerdijk & Voss, 2010).
Direct contacts typically occur through physical interactions with touchpoints, whereas
indirect contacts occur around encounters with representations of the value proposition in
the forms of word-of-mouth, advertising, news, or other types of editorial content (Meyer
& Schwager, 2007). At a broader level, a customer journey can be viewed as a service
system composed of a network of agents and interactions that integrate resources for
value co-creation (Ng et al., 2012). As experiences are co-created along many direct and
indirect contacts, customers rarely recognize the enabling structure behind them;
instead perceive each experience as a complex and unitary feeling (Gentile et al., 2007).
Consequently, customer experience management is transforming into a multidisciplinary
initiative that involves marketing, human resources, operations, organizational structure,
and information technology focusing on orchestrating all these direct and indirect inter-
actions to help customers co-create satisfying, enjoyable, and memorable experiences
that embody the fundamental value proposition of the brand (Ostrom et al., 2010; Patrício
et al., 2011; Stuart & Tax, 2004; Teixeira et al., 2012). As an enhancer of organizational per-
formance, this expansive perspective positions customer experience as a fundamental
source of sustainable competitive advantage (Andreassen et al., 2016).
Although each customer journey is unique in its composition of incidents, usually all
share the same four major chapters that progress from (1) the initial contact to (2) orient-
ing the customer (i.e. onboarding), followed by (3) interaction (i.e. moment of truths), to
end with (4) retention and advocacy. These chapters may be divided into more
nuanced subchapters or abstracted into fewer chapters, such as pre-purchase, purchase,
and post-purchase (e.g. Howard & Sheth, 1969; Neslin et al., 2006; Puccinelli et al., 2009;
Van Doorn et al., 2010).
Each of the above-mentioned chapters is composed of a number of touchpoints, which
are generative and recursive in nature, interlinked in a number of different configurations
(Berry et al., 2002; Saffer, 2010). From the service providers’ perspective, at the most basic
level, a touchpoint can be seen as a discrete encounter that takes place at a certain time
(Halvorsrud et al., 2016). However, a service encounter rarely takes the form of a discrete
communication originating from a transmitter to an intended receiver. It is often more
interactive, social, and emotional (Bolton et al., 2014). More likely, customers perceive
each contact as having a holistic nature, which is influenced by a number of experiential
elements, some of which are beyond a company’s control (Bitner & Wang, 2014). This is the
main reason why not the experience itself, but the service context in which the subjective
experience takes place can be designed (Forlizzi & Ford, 2000).
It is important to understand the difference between service process design and custo-
mer journey mapping. Service process design, often called as service blueprinting, is a
4 K. VARNALI

visual rendering of the service process that describes service characteristics in terms of
equipment, responsibilities of employees, quality, and cost factors. Service blueprints let
employees, customers, and managers know in concrete terms what the service involves
and understand their respective roles in its delivery (Bitner, Ostrom, & Morgan, 2008). Cus-
tomer journeys, on the other hand, depict the service process from the vantage point of
the customer, involving his or her expectations, state of mind, emotional responses,
together with barriers and motivators for action.

Taking a Complexity Theory-Based Perspective

Adopting a complexity theory perspective, in essence, requires acknowledging that reality
is actually a complex system, which is made up of a large number of parts that have many
interactions (Simon, 1996). Anderson (1999) describes a complex system as ‘a system chan-
ging inputs to outputs in a non-linear way because its components interact with each
other via a web of feedback loops’ (p. 217). The central idea of complexity theory is that
reality takes the form of emergent, dynamic, and self-organizing complex systems interact-
ing in ways that significantly influence the probabilities of later events (Urry, 2005). A fun-
damental implication emerging from the science of complexity is that systems are
different from the sum of their parts and hence their behavior is unpredictable in
nature, while they are also constrained by order-generating rules (Brown & Eisenhardt,
1998). Regardless of how chaotic the system is order naturally emerges through self-
organization (Anderson, 1999). Reflecting to the domain of customer experience, since
the service environment perpetually changes, service requirements can never be fully
pre-defined, but rather are emergent. New requirements always emerge and hence the
system goes through an unanticipated process of self-organization. Thus, customer
service can be considered as a self-organizing system.
From this perspective, the organizational metaphor changes from a pre-defined
mechanistic structure to an ecosystem of co-evolving elements (Kernick, 2006). In his mile-
stone article, Anderson (1999) conceptualized complex adaptive organizations as self-
organizing networks sustained by importing energy. Employee improvisation, product
champions, and emergent strategies provide examples for self-generated emergent
sources of energy in organizations (Lewin, 1999). For instance, a recent study by Anh
and Thuy (2017) revealed that individuated, relational, and empowered interactions
expressed by service frontline employees play a critical role in value co-creation in health-
care services. The concept of value co-creation in service-dominant logic in marketing pro-
vides a nuanced way of understanding how organizations might import energy from
customers as self-generated sources of dissipative energy (Grönroos & Voima, 2013). For
instance, customers’ active emotional involvement and emotion display in extended
service encounters have been shown to play important roles in the co-construction of
the service experience (Tumbat, 2011). Horbel, Popp, Woratschek, and Wilson (2016)
showed that spectator-induced atmosphere exerts a positive effect on the overall experi-
ence of a sports event. Even in the context of public services, co-creation contributes to
innovation by helping public organizations to overcome the challenges posed by scarce
resources (Alves, 2013). Complexity science has already given so much to organization
science in general and service research in particular; and has played a fundamental role
in shaping the contemporary view of an organization.
 THE SERVICE INDUSTRIES JOURNAL 5

Complex systems are characterized as autopoietic (Luhmann, 1995), path-dependent

(Arthur, 1994), and non-linear (Casti, 1994) nested hierarchies (Simon, 1996). These funda-
mental characteristics of complex systems resonate well with the recent academic think-
ing and theorizing on how customer experience unfolds along a journey.
Autopoietic systems are living systems entailing a process of self-making (Urry, 2005).
What happens at each touchpoint in a customer journey participates in the production
or transformation of what happens at another touchpoint in the same journey. In that
sense, the journey is produced by distinct experiential episodes and the resulting
overall experience (i.e. end-to-end journey experience) in turn produces the distinct
experiential episodes. Furthermore, customer journeys are made up of reiterative feed-
back loops in a network of interactions. The effects of an element’s (e.g. firm agent, cus-
tomer, output of a process) action at one touchpoint are recursively fed back to the
element itself and this, in turn, affects the way the element behaves in the future. As
such, customer journeys are autopoietic systems. In appreciation of the autopoietic
nature of customer experience, several scholars have called for research with an inclusive
view of all touchpoints within service experiences to truly understand the interdependen-
cies among distinct service encounters throughout a journey (Bolton et al., 2014; Gustafs-
son et al., 2015). More specifically, in a recent article, Voorhees and his colleagues (2017)
suggested a specific protocol regarding the uses of terms pre-core, core, and post-core
service encounter periods within a service experience to illuminate the relationships
among these three distinct periods in determining the cumulative customer outcomes.
Pre-core and core service encounters cumulatively influence the experience co-created
in the post-core service encounters period, in which customers act on their experience
in the two previous periods (Johnson et al., 2012; Voorhees et al., 2017).
Complex systems are non-linear, such that they usually respond to change by reconfi-
guring themselves close to their original state, but when transformation does occur, the
size of the change invariably bears little relationship to the size of the trigger (Kernick,
2006). Customer journeys are non-linear, because customer experience is emergent,
very sensitive to the surrounding world, and influenced by small fluctuations. Based on
anecdotal evidence and prior theory, Bolton and her colleagues (2014) suggested that
small details in service design – by creating very high levels of customer satisfaction, sti-
mulating arousal and pleasure, engendering delight – when strategically orchestrated
across every customer touchpoint, have multiplier effects on the customer experience.
They posit that the effect of these little details is often not detected by traditional
multi-dimensional approaches to service quality. In an effort to propose a framework
based on the metaphor of a journey for a structured portrayal of service delivery, Halvors-
rud et al. (2016) identified four types of deviations during service delivery: occurrence of ad
hoc touchpoints, irregularities in the sequence of logically connected touchpoints, occur-
rence of failures in touchpoints, and missing touchpoints. All of these deviations from the
predesigned theoretical journey have the potential to inflict unexpected non-linear effects
on the cumulative customer experience that emerge along the actual customer journey.
Customer journeys are path-dependent because the ordering of events through time
(i.e. direct or indirect contacts with touchpoints) very significantly influences the non-
linear ways in which the overall customer experience eventually turns out. It has been
shown that the sequence in which the positive and negative events occur matters in
the formation of retrospective evaluations (Chen & Rao, 2002; Labroo & Ramanathan,
6 K. VARNALI

2007). Maintaining this notion, Verhoef et al. (2009) highlighted the importance of past
experiences in determining current and future ones. As such, simple causal models
often turn out to be inadequate for modeling customer experience; even when non-
linear relations between dependent and independent variables are introduced by
means of logarithms or interaction terms (Anderson, 1999; Woodside, 2014).
Linear model building, which is the dominant research approach in marketing, aims to
describe and predict complex effects by simple equations to aid managerial decision
making through the use of a manageable set of data. Complexity theory, on the other
hand, aims to seek regularities in complex systems and describe how complex causes
can produce simple effects (Woodside, 2014). Adopting a complexity perspective does
not necessarily mean to abandon linear modeling. Instead, it simply calls for moving
away from methodological rigidity and toward more pragmatic and holistic (i.e. patterns
or systems) research (Gummesson, 2008), greater development of tools tailored for par-
ticular contexts (Patrício et al., 2008; Patrício et al., 2011; Teixeira et al., 2012; Voss et al.,
2016), and fewer claims of universality (Woodside, 2014).
Finally, customer journeys are nested hierarchies that contain other complex systems.
Although customer journey maps often depict touchpoints as lined up linearly along a
time-line, in essence, each touchpoint may entail a deeper-level journey with many touch-
points within itself. As such, touchpoints have a helix-like structure that experience unfold-
ing at each touchpoint has a self-similar organization at different scales and successive
iterations add increasingly finer levels of detail (Dubberly & Evenson, 2008).
Overall, the aforementioned nature of a customer journey highly fits with the classic
definition of a non-linear complex system (Anderson, 1999; Simon, 1996; Urry, 2005). In
the language of complexity theory, a customer journey (i.e. a service system) represents
an aggregate entity (Holland, 1995) combining various tangible and intangible resources
or elements, which may vary across industries, such as technology, management tech-
niques, feedback mechanisms, culture, people, processes, etc. Moreover, each element
is composed of sub-systems including people, interfaces, equipments, processes, etc.
(Chae, 2012). From this perspective, service design can be conceived as the art and
science of identifying regularities in a customer journey – a complex system – and strate-
gically intervening to some of its parts to change the behavior of the whole system to
better support customers in co-creating their desired experiences. In line with this new
definition, customer journey mapping, the analysis technique that allows understanding
the overall customer experience designed by the firm from the perspective of customers,
becomes an organized effort to reduce a complex description of a system to a formal one
and compress a longer description into a shorter one that is much easier to understand
and manage (Anderson, 1999).

The fuzzy characteristics of today’s customer journeys

Especially in retail settings, when consumers advance through the steps of a predesigned
physical service landscape, competitor brands are often outside of the frame of reference.
However, as consumers learn about the details of the offerings as they advance from one
step to another, and as each new package of information unfolds, unexpected news might
trigger them to refer to competitor offerings’ details. This is often enabled and facilitated
by the mobile handsets as they are ubiquitously connected to the Internet and hence are
 THE SERVICE INDUSTRIES JOURNAL 7

readily available for information search at virtually any moment throughout a journey
(Varnali & Toker, 2010). This phenomenon not only contributes to the level of complexity
of consumers’ traditional path to purchase, but it also reduces the amount of control firms
have on customer journeys (Brynjolfsson, Hu, & Rahman, 2013; Rapp, Baker, Bachrach,
Ogilvie, & Beitelspacher, 2015).
In fact, service delivery networks, today, are transforming into customer experience
ecosystems, which can be defined as ‘the complex set of relationships among a company’s
employees, partners, and customers that determines the quality of all customer inter-
actions’ (Bodine, 2013, p. 7). Value is co-created in a complex set of interactions and inter-
dependencies, where value co-created for each actor depends on his/her own actions and
the actions of other actors (Pinho, Beirao, Patrício, & Fisk, 2014). WOM and boycott activi-
ties are widely cited examples of customer participation at the business ecosystem level
(Joo & Marakhimov, 2018). In such ecosystems, the focal firm has much less control
over the overall customer journey because value delivery partners and even the customers
themselves take control of and responsibility for many activities related to the focal experi-
ence (Akaka & Vargo, 2015; Chandler & Lusch, 2015; Tax, McCutcheon, & Wilkinson, 2013).
Finally, we see hyper-jumping consumers who jump from one step to another creat-
ing unexpected loopholes in the journey. Today’s customer journeys consist of a myriad
of touchpoints scattered across multiple channels and media (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016;
McColl-Kennedy et al., 2015). An increasing number of consumers change channels
while traveling through the journey and seem to steer out at an early step before con-
cluding the journey, and appear out of nowhere later in time at another step. These
hyper-jumpers actually start their journey at one channel, finish at another, while wan-
dering across touchpoints on different channels upon their preferences. The design of
a journey that adequately reflects real-life customer behavior should be able to recog-
nize the root causes of and support these anomalies, yet at the same time allow
regular consumers to advance in their own pace within the predesigned flow of the
journey.
It is imperative to notice that mapping customer journeys is a highly constructive, sub-
jective, and interpretative technique. First of all, the real journey along which the customer
travels seldom fits with the journey predesigned by the firm (Halvorsrud et al., 2016). Fur-
thermore, useful information regarding the real journey is rarely readily accessible. It is
often very difficult and costly to compile, reconcile, and act on the voice of the customers
and employees resonating from surveys, field research, complaints, and channel data
(McColl-Kennedy et al., 2015). Since the ability of the firm in taking appropriate corrective
actions to improve bottom-line customer experience is largely bound by the accuracy and
validity of the behavioral model used to describe, explain, and predict future customer
behavior, weak models ignoring the complexities inherent in realities pose a significant
threat in the face of effective customer experience management.

Applying the Tenets of Complexity Theory to Service Research

This section of the article aims to apply the following tenets (Ti) of complexity theory as
formulated by Woodside (2014, 2018) to the domain of customer experience research
to generate implications for research and practice. The implications shall contribute
rigor in customer experience research and help service researchers and designers to
8 K. VARNALI

offer richer insights with respect to the conditions that drive real-life customer responses
along customer journeys.

The recipe principles

T.1: A simple antecedent condition may be necessary, but a simple antecedent condition is
rarely sufficient for predicting a high or low score in an outcome condition. (Woodside,
2014, p. 2497)
T.2: A complex antecedent condition of two or more simple conditions is sufficient for a con-
sistently high score in an outcome condition. (Woodside, 2014, p. 2499)

Mainstream research on customer experience seldom makes the distinction between a

necessary and a sufficient condition. The dominant logic of multiple regression analysis
(MRA) focuses on estimating net effects of antecedent conditions on an outcome. Net
effects approach investigates the relationship between an antecedent condition and an
outcome by separating the influence of other antecedent conditions in the equation.
However, components of complex systems do not function like that (Woodside, 2014).
This approach falls short in delineating whether a condition is necessary or sufficient,
and hence may be misleading for several reasons, especially in the domain of customer
experience.
When an antecedent variable consistently scores high together with the high scores of
an outcome variable, correlational analysis would suggest a strong relationship. However,
when another antecedent condition that is also scoring high in these instances is missing
in the equation, the net effects estimation would be highly misleading. This is an unob-
served case of multi-collinearity. What if these two multi-collinear experiential elements
are somehow interdependent? If the service designer misses this fact, an action to
improve the outcome (i.e. investing to improve the rate of the antecedent condition in
the equation) might result in an unexpected deterioration of the outcome.
To illustrate this, consider analyzing customer experience at a restaurant. After careful
consideration and several visits to the site, the service designer selects a number of experi-
ential elements and assigns appropriate metrics for each. Data are collected on these
metrics and is analyzed via a method from the MRA family. The results suggest that the
ambiance of the restaurant, quality of food, and the speed of service are the experiential
elements significantly driving the resulting dining experience, with the speed of service
having the largest net effect. Given this insight, the manager decides to increase the
speed of service by incentivizing speediness. The next month, the resulting overall
dining experience score goes down. In their optimum speed, the waiters and waitresses
were kind and smiling to the customers. But when they were rushed to increase the
service speed, they were no longer displaying friendly gestures or exchanging kind con-
versations. A non-significant part of the standard service in that restaurant turned into a
severe pain point following an investment to another experiential element with allegedly
having the highest net effect on the resulting experience.
The above case illustrates the threat posed by an unobserved multi-collinearity among
interdependent antecedent conditions in an experiential environment. Another source of
error is the observed multi-collinearity. In case of high multi-collinearity among selected
antecedent conditions, the service designer has an equation with none of the antecedent
conditions having a large net effect, while at the same time a model explaining a
 THE SERVICE INDUSTRIES JOURNAL 9

substantial portion of the variance in the resulting experience. In such a case, which experi-
ential elements are necessary and what combination of these elements is sufficient? MRA
approach has no answer to this question. Adopting a complexity perspective calls for
moving beyond the paradigm of linear model building for constructing and testing
theory in the context of complex systems.
Diagnostic statistics that are generally provided with MRA and null hypothesis statisti-
cal tests may lead to reduced accuracy, overconfidence, and confusion (Armstrong, 2012;
Hubbard, 2015), especially when the domain of inquiry can be characterized as a
complex system (e.g. a service setting). Ziliak and McCloskey (2009) argue that ‘reducing
the scientific and commercial problems of testing, estimation and interpretation to one
of statistical significance, … a diversion from the proper objects of scientific study, …
produces unchecked a large net loss for science and society’ (p. 2302). In line with
this argument, there is substantial merit to move away from research that severely
suffers from the illusion of predictability in theory construction and testing in order to
avoid overly shallow and simplistic behavioral modeling of customer experience (Wood-
side, 2017). Adopting a complexity perspective calls for the use of techniques suitable for
assessing macro-level behavior of a complex system such as neural networks, genetic
algorithms, and classifier systems; or algorithm-based meso-level research methods
allowing to capture multiple realities that exist in a complex system, such as configural
analysis.
Several researchers have successfully illustrated how deeper understanding can be
achieved by identifying causal recipes using configural analysis in a variety of service con-
texts, such as customer complaint management (e.g. Kasnakoglu, Yilmaz, & Varnali, 2016;
Yilmaz, Varnali, & Kasnakoglu, 2016), service infusion (Forkmann, Henneberg, Witell, &
Kindström, 2017), product innovation (Cheng, Chang, & Li, 2013), luxury hotel service inno-
vations (Ordanini, Parasuraman, & Rubera, 2014), temporary-transformations of self via
beauty salon and spa treatments (Wu et al., 2014), intention to purchase tourism
weather insurance (Olya & Altinay, 2016), patient loyalty (Chang et al., 2013), customer
behavior in casinos (Woodside, Prentice, & Larsen, 2015), and asymmetric modeling of
value added in service industries (Olya, Altinay, & De Vita, 2018). Causal recipes are com-
binatory (conjunctive) statements of two or more antecedent conditions (Ragin, 2008). His-
torically, due to the immense cognitive demand of the task, scholars could examine only a
few cases to identify causal recipes depicting more than one way to the desired outcome
(e.g. Montgomery, 1975). Today, modern configural analysis software, such as fuzzy set
qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), makes it possible to bring the logic and empirical
intensity of qualitative approaches to study the complex context in which customer
experience emerges. When more than one causal recipe is identified for a high value of
a desired customer response, service researchers and designers could not only foresee
potential errors based on multi-collinearity, but also develop a more nuanced understand-
ing of the nature of interdependencies among components of the complex system produ-
cing overall customer experience.

The equifinality principle

T.3: A model that is sufficient is not necessary for an outcome having a high score to occur.
(Woodside, 2014, p. 2499)
10 K. VARNALI

In complex systems, there is more than one configuration of antecedent elements that
lead to a high score in an outcome (e.g. net promoter score, overall customer satisfac-
tion, repurchase intention). Reality at a touchpoint differs not only for customers from
different segments (e.g. behavioral or psychographic) but also for customers from the
same segment who travel along different paths (the sequence and configuration of
touchpoints) before coming to that particular touchpoint (i.e. path dependency). As com-
panies allow customers more freedom to decide upon their preferred channel of inter-
action at different stages of their journey, they construct touchpoints providing similar
functions and services on different channels (Anderl, Schumann, & Kunz, 2016). There-
fore, customers become enabled in the sense that they could construct their own jour-
neys upon their differing preferences. Customers moving along a journey enter each
experiential episode with a number of questions and expectations, some level of exper-
tise, and an emotional state, and leave with changes inflicted upon each of these factors.
The interdependencies and feedback loops between these experiential episodes cause
customers traveling along different paths to live in different realities; henceforth the
resulting experiences in these different realities would be potentially conjured by differ-
ent configurations and levels of experiential elements. For instance, in their attempt to
determine different ways to succeed with service infusion, Forkmann et al. (2017)
revealed that different equifinal configurations exist, and service infusion success can
be achieved without fully developed service capabilities. Consequently, an important
implication of adopting a complexity perspective in customer experience research is
that researchers have to be vigilant to identify potential equifinal configurations (e.g.
alternative navigational routes major customer segments could travel across multiple
channels) and construct models representing each configuration of experiential
elements to truly understand the dynamics and more accurately predict the outcomes
of the cumulative customer experience along a journey.
Finally, examining contrarian cases in the data set would be highly informative to cope
with equifinality. Contrarian cases display relationships that are counter to a large main
effect between antecedents and outcomes (Woodside, 2013, 2014, 2018). ‘Even when
an effect size is large between two variables, cases exist in almost all large data sets
that run counter to the main effects relationship’ (Woodside, 2014, p. 2501). Immersive
ethnographic field studies would be instrumental in understanding the experiential epi-
sodes pertaining to the contrarian cases and depicting how these episodes come to life
around each individual touchpoint. Netnography is another viable research method in
this context, providing rich insights gained from unsolicited customer stories shared in
social media (Kozinets, 2015). Over a series of iterations, the researcher would finally
reveal parsimonious patterns in customer and employee stories to identify sequential criti-
cal incidences representing potential alternative recipes for a satisfactory experience for a
particular segment of customers. Identification of alternative recipes would help research-
ers to have better control over the potential effects of a change inflicted upon a particular
experiential element across different customer segments.

The causal asymmetry principle

T.4: Recipes indicating a second outcome (e.g. rejection) are unique and not the mirror oppo-
sites of recipes of a different outcome (e.g. acceptance). (Woodside, 2014, p. 2500)
 THE SERVICE INDUSTRIES JOURNAL 11

Services literature is replete with studies focusing exclusively on success. When the depen-
dent variable is measured with a scale ranging from not agreement to full agreement to a
statement regarding the level of success (e.g. How likely is it that you would recommend
[brand] to a friend or colleague?), the associated isomorphic model of customer behavior is
unlikely to be very informative about the causes of failure (Di Benedetto, 1999; Woodside,
2014). Touchpoints along a customer journey embody a variety of experiential elements
driving customers’ cognitive and affective responses. Some of these elements would be
consistently associated with high levels of success and never with failure in terms of the
quality of customer experience. What makes customers happy may involve a completely
different set of discrete events when compared to what makes them sad. Furthermore,
there might be different tipping points, as described by Gladwell (2002), on different
experiential elements that lead to non-linear effects on the resulting happiness versus
sadness. Therefore, to the extent to which service researchers’ focus remains exclusively
on modeling success, it would be difficult for them to understand and avoid failure.

The interdependence principle

T.5: An individual feature (attribute or action) can contribute positively or negatively to a
specific outcome depending on the presence or absence of the other features. (Woodside,
2014, p. 2500)

In complex systems, a high score in an antecedent condition may contribute positively or

negatively to an outcome (i.e. the resulting customer experience) depending upon
another antecedent condition. This tenet of complexity theory suggests that there
seems to be a number of recipes that include a unique blend of ingredients to indicate
a high score on customer experience, and a particular ingredient can contribute positively
and negatively depending upon other ingredients. Therefore, the valence and strength of
the effect of an individual experiential element on the overall customer experience is likely
to depend on the design of the whole journey.
From the perspective of interdependence principle, the risks associated with using a
single overarching model to describe, explain, and predict customer experience
becomes vividly evident. As a rule of thumb, in their attempts to understand the potential
effects of each experiential element on the end-to-end journey, research in service design
should consider all of the unique combinations of elements that can be produced using all
the elements scattered across all the touchpoints along the customer journey (Gustafsson
et al., 2015; Lemon & Verhoef, 2016).

Conclusion
As customers go through a number of steps when interacting with a product, brand,
service, or a technology, they navigate along a complex journey that defines their
overall consumption experience. The underlying logic of complexity theory encourages
both scholars and industry experts working in the field of customer experience to
conjure empirical models of the occurrence of multiple realities. In that sense, adopting
a complexity theory perspective contributes not only to the methodological rigor of
research in customer experience but also to the creativity and adaptive capacity of the sol-
utions crafted by service designers to relieve pain points and foster satisfying incidents
12 K. VARNALI

along customer journeys. Drawing analogies from complexity theory unavoidably puts
emphasis on the spontaneous and improvizational nature of interactions among many
elements interlinked along a customer journey. Therefore, future research in customer
experience could benefit much from pattern recognition techniques, which may be
more receptive to the intricacies of the context in which the complex system self-
organizes (Kernick, 2006).
In the awe of the complexity of today’s service systems and networks, Ostrom et al.
(2015) called for input from disciplines outside the traditional service research arena to
advance the field of service research. The present article contributes to the understanding
of the concept of customer journey by focusing on its characteristics that fit with those of a
complex system. Rethinking the customer journey as a complex system and organizing the
discussion around the basic tenets of complexity theory provides an opportunity to lever-
age the interdisciplinary perspectives of service researchers to identify critical research
challenges and priorities in an effort to strengthen the field (Ostrom, Parasuraman,
Bowen, Patricio, & Voss, 2015). Complexity theory has the potential to serve as an integra-
tive framework for differing definitions and fragmented findings in the customer experi-
ence literature that could lead to innovative ideas to move the field forward. Finally, in
line with McColl-Kennedy et al. (2015) call for abandoning a static, dyadic, organization-
centric perspective in customer experience research and practice, adopting a complexity
theory-based stance in customer experience research has tremendous potential to move
the global service research community toward the desired direction, because it would by-
definition require a human-centered, context-sensitive, creative, flexible, iterative,
dynamic, and multi-actor perspective in both conceptualizing customer experience and
setting future research agendas.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Kaan Varnali http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9731-6532

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