Students

UMCS creates an opportunity to study for young people from around the world. This is complemented by the signing of new agreements by UMCS with foreign universities. The aim of those agreements is not only to exchange scientific and teaching experiences with educational personnel but as primary exchange students’ experiences as part of international education programs. Participation in these programs is a key component of the UMCS’s strategy. In the 2021/2022 academic year, the University community expanded by over 7,200 new students, including approximately seven hundred new foreigners. The university authorities interpret the fact that such a large group of young people, also from outside our country, have trusted UMCS because of the expanding UMCS offer by +8 new fields of study in 2022 responding to the requirements of the changing labor market. UMCS also obtains international accreditations, which is tantamount to recognition of the highest European standards in terms of the quality of education. Customer Experience Management for Erasmus students.

The Concept of Customer Experience

The concept of customer experience has been described in many ways in the literature. Although it seems that each description is unique and different from the others, it also shows some level of consistency.

Basically, customer experience is considered to be the aggregated, cumulated (Carbone and Haeckel 1994) and coalesced (Padgett and Allen 1997) emotional (Dewey 1963; Edvardsson et al. 2005; Sandstrom et al. 2008) and mental (Edvardsson et al. 2005) feeling (Padgett and Allen 1997) that are subjectively (Meyer and Schwager 2007) perceived by the customers (Carbone and Haeckel 1994; Edvardsson et al. 2005) during the interaction (Gupta and Vajic 1999), encounter (Carbone and Haeckel 1994), or progress (Carbone and Haeckel 1994; Dewey 1963; Gupta and Vajic 1999) of the product and/or service consumption (Edvardsson et al. 2005; Padgett and Allen 1997).

Why – Benefits of Customer Experience

Meyer and Schwager (2007) suggested that customer experience should be a company’s first concern. Berry and Carbone (2007) also argued that great organizations systematically manage customer experience aiming to establish strong
emotional connections with their customers. Many have claimed that positive customer experience consistently creates values that are appreciated by customers (Berry and Carbone 2007; Berry et al. 2002; Chen and Chen 2010; Hoch 2002; Voss
2004). However, it seems that there is no systematic analysis of what benefits customer experience can bring to the service providers. Following an initial literature review in the relevant area, it appears that four benefits have attracted the most
research interest, while others exist: Customer Satisfaction, Customer Expectations, Customer Loyalty, Behavioural Intentions.

Experience – based design

Experience-based design is a concept of e-commerce design that focuses on the customer experience, rather than the system or process (Bate and Robert 2006). It suggests that the goal of design should be to enhance customer experience, and the final user or customer of the service should be involved during the design process (Abels et al. 1999).

There are two important reasons for service providers to adopt experience-based design:

• 1) customers have a good sense of the service features, so that they can tell how to best meet customers’ requirements (Abels et al. 1999), and
• 2) a good design based on customer experience can improve the performance of service providers (Pickles et al. 2008).

However, only a small number of studies on e-service design appear to have undertaken this approach (Taylor et al. 2003). Although the current literature on experience-based design in e-service is limited, there appears to be an increasing number of publications on e-service customer experience (see section 2.5 for more details), which may potentially support the concept of experience-based design in the near future.