Comprehensive Approach to Customer Experience Quality Assessment in the Context of Sales Management Goals and Rising Retail Trade Competition Trends

In the current conditions of increased retail trade competition, which include the pandemic, further decrease in consumers’ purchasing power, tougher competition between federal and regional retail chains and digitalization, it is crucial to improve the customer experience quality, ensuring its compliance with new customers’ requirements and the opportunities presented by digital technologies. In this context, the need to solve the problem of improving the validity of the assessment of the customer experience quality, which is considered the most important object of sales management and a factor of competitiveness of trading companies, becomes particularly relevant. The study of various approaches to conducting this assessment made it possible to identify such problems as lack of consensus on the essence of the concept of ‘customer experience quality’, incomplete accounting of factors affecting the customer experience quality, lack of systematization of indicators of its assessment, insufficient development of approaches to assessing the customer experience quality compared to the competitors. The author clarified the definition of ‘customer experience’ from the standpoint of the interests of trade companies interested in assessing the customer experience quality as a tool that provides an increase in the level of sales management and competitiveness. Based on the proposed approach to the systematization of indicators for assessing the customer experience quality, an integrated approach to its assessment is presented, which allows not only calculating integral indicators for assessing the customer experience quality and comparing it with that of competitors, but also private indicators that allow identifying directions of its improvement.