Does Customer Experience Always Benefit Company? Examining Customers’ Epistemic Motivation and Interaction With Service Contexts

The main purpose of this study is explaining how and when customer experience benefits the company. Built upon social identity theory, we propose that customer experience leads to customer engagement behavior, via two routes: customer-company and customer-employee identification. Furthermore, we advance that customers’ epistemic motivation negatively moderates the mediated effect of customer experience on customer engagement behavior. We ran two studies to validate the measurement of customer experience and to test our hypotheses. For the two studies, we employed a survey method by recruiting consumers of beauty salons in Vietnam. The results demonstrated that EXQ as a measurement for customer experience is applicable to the context of the study and provided empirical support for the hypotheses. Such as, this research found that customer experience positively influences customer engagement behavior as mediated by customer-company and customer-employee identification. Furthermore, this research revealed that customer epistemic motivation negatively moderates the mediated effect of customer experience on customer engagement behavior via customer-employee identification. However, the moderating role of customer epistemic motivation is insignificant for the mediated relationship via customer-company identification. Finally, this research offers theoretical and practical contributions that are elaborated and further discussed.