Date of Publication :14th September 2021

Abstract: Customer experience has been one of the focus areas for organizations to gain a competitive advantage in the market. The existing literature is full of various knowledge base, models, methodologies, and some paradigm shift ideas. Since Pine and Gilmore was one of the early researchers to address the concept of customer experience followed by Carbone and Hackle in 1999. We have observed that most of the existing literature is more about hospitality, retail, tourism, and service industry though the products and goods studies are also found to be addressed. One major gap area is the Primary or base industry, where there is limited knowledge available including Automobile, metals and mining and others. We have also found varying definition of “Consumer experience” and most of the studies addressing some or part of overall holistic consumer experience. The main reason for the lack of holistic approach seems to arise from multidimensional nature of customer experience phenomenon. In our literature review we have observed regular discipline of cognitive and hedonic as main but there is literature which comprises psychology, human behavior, economics, anthropology, Neurology; sociology, organizational behavior also contributing to explain the consumer experience phenomenon. This multi-disciplinary nature of consumer experience still leaves many areas to be further researched and explored. From this multidisciplinary point of view, we can safely say the holistic consumer experience research is still in its infancy. The literary review also included models, methodologies, and philosophies to build a great customer experience, some sort of guidance for firms and marketing and service managers about strategy, steps, and measurement in building a great customer experience for their respective customers. Some new concept such as co-creation of values, joint working between the firm and industrial customer, experience design is also observed. Purpose of our study was to go through the various stages of evolution of concept of customer experience from 1980 onwards and understand the knowledge and paradigm shifts which happened in this field in last three decades. We were surprised to also come across some of the work in 1960 and mention of customer experience in Adam Smith’s work. Finally, as explained by Pine and Gilmore 1998 and 1999, Shaw and Iven’s 2002, Voss 2003, Prahalad and Ramaswamy 2004, Meyer and Schwager 2007, customer experience has become numeri uno priority for the organizations and is seen as a true competitive edge in today’s crowded market Place. From our study of literature, we found that there are many more areas such as CX measurement , universal CX definition and multidisciplinary holistic studies where further research is required

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