Author(s): Shreya Jha, Amit Mookerjee and Ansh Gupta
Businesses have started focusing on how their products and services can bring in emotions such happiness, relief, excitement, nostalgia etc. to their customers, going beyond the earlier focus on satisfaction and delight. Arousal of these emotions has made the customer experience memorable. These emotionally embedded experiential memories have been found to play a decisive role in the consumer choices, whether positive and negative. Therefore, in the last few years, there has been significant research on the factors that create favorable experiences for the customers which can differentiate brands. This paper draws on the Theory-Context-Characteristics-Methods (TCCM) (Paul and Rosado-Serrano, 2019) review framework, and provides a review of the literature with an overview, synthesizing and classifying existing research on emotions and customer experience research over the last two decades. The study also includes the use of bibliometric and network analysis for identifying key trends and promising directions for future research. The main contribution of this article is to give a comprehensive analysis of the existing literature, including themes such as managing emotional competence during services encounters, role of situational factors, technological transformation; provides a synthesis of emotion laden phenomena and their relationships; effect on increasing customer loyalty, and the generation of macro-topics and future research directions.