Customer experience quality of cardiologists on medical symposia in Moscow

<p>The thesis investigates the concept &ldquo;customer experience&rdquo; and considers it in the light of quite specific services - medical symposia that are poorly studied nowadays in the scientific literature: small number of articles study an interaction between physicians and pharmaceutical companies from a marketing point of view. Moreover the concept is more likely presented in the consulting companies&rsquo; web-sites than in Russian marketing scientific literature.</p><p>The thesis&rsquo; structure reflects main goals of the research: the first chapter examines theoretic basis of the concept &quot;customer experience.&quot; The second one describes basic features of the studied market, services and target audience and the customer experience quality (EXQ) study &nbsp;methodology. The third chapter presents the results of the research and EXQ of a cardiologist at medical symposia in Moscow.</p><p>The research methodology is based on P. Klaus and S. Maklan&rsquo;s EXQ model, and consists of three main stages: qualitative (8 in-depth interviews with physicians and 7 - with representatives of pharmaceutical companies), quantitative (physicians&rsquo; questionnaire with 114 collected responses) and analytical stage (factor and regression analysis of the data collected).</p><p>EXQ model was created at the research last stage. It describes the structure of cardiologists&rsquo; customer experience at medical symposia, as well as relationship between marketing metrics and the EXQ model components that include: &quot;The quality of symposia&rsquo;s organization&quot;, &quot;Usefulness for practice&quot; and &quot;Emotions&quot;.</p><p>The main marketing metrics for symposia could be divided into three groups: &quot;Disease awareness and physicians&#39; qualification increase&quot;, &quot;Word-of-Mouth spread&quot; and &quot;New treatment approaches implementation&rdquo;.</p><p>Regression analysis has shown that &ldquo;Disease awareness and physicians&#39; qualification increase&rdquo; is affected by 2 factors: &ldquo;The quality of symposia&rsquo;s organization&rdquo; and &quot;Usefulness for practice&quot;, the latter has a greater influence rate; &quot;Word-of-Mouth spread&quot; is affected by all three factors: &quot;The quality of symposia&rsquo;s organization&quot;, &quot;Usefulness for practice&quot; and &quot;Emotions&quot;; but in order to increase physician&rsquo;s to change treatment approaches after participation in the symposia (&quot;New treatment approaches implementation&rdquo;), it is necessary to have very emotional presentations in line with excellent symposia&rsquo;s organization.</p><p>The analysis confirms customer experience concept relevance to medical symposia as it shows importance of emotional component. The model allows to highlight key points of symposia organization depending on goals as well.</p><p>Limitation of our study is that the EXQ model does not take into account customer experience in a time continuum: factors that influence customer perception before the start of the symposia were excluded from analysis.</p><p>Developed in this paper EXQ model could be the basis for the further development of performance &amp; quality measurement systems of medical symposia for cardiologists and medical society in general, as well as a basis for further consideration of the EXQ concept in MICE &nbsp;industry</p>