Customer experience with smartphones : a university student perspective

Abstract

The classical view that an industry is a customer-satisfying process and not a goods-producing process is vital for all businesses to understand. Today the mobile industry have produced a smartphone which represents a dramatic departure from traditional computing platforms as they no longer represent a static notion of context, where changes are absent, small or predictable. Therefore, today’s industries need to begin the production process with customer’s needs and not with patents, raw materials, products or selling skills. With this view rather, an organisation can only create the environment and the circumstances in which the consumer could have an experience. Furthermore, an organisation cannot grant an experience to the consumer in isolation. In seeking to expand an understating of the above classical view, this study inquired into customer experience derived from owing and using the most decorated product of the era, that is, the smartphone.

The essence of this study aimed at investigating customer experience by studying smartphone usage from the students’ perspective. It studied the gap between students’ expectation and the subsequent experiences in order to determine satisfaction levels. Furthermore, cognitive dissonance was investigated to determine if there were any remorse feelings towards the smartphone. A descriptive study was employed with a quantitative inquiry and the survey used the convenience sampling method. A questionnaire was administered to students within the Durban University of Technology (DUT) fraternity. The Statistical Package for Social Science Software (SPSS) version 21 was used to analyse and to interpret the data.

The key findings of the study indicate that South African university students (DUT) have positive experiences with the smartphones. Albeit, the findings indicate positive experiences, minimal presence of cognitive dissonance is also depicted. The presence of dissonance highlights that an idea cannot have a single measure which is universally meaningful. Therefore, the study expose that every product will always be exposed to suggestions of change, no matter how it can be deemed smart.