In her career spanning over two decades, Arunima has held key positions across an array of companies such as Acme Healthcare, ICICI Bank, Eureka OSPL, Social Wavelength, and AdFactors PR, prior to joining Wunderman Thompson in 2018.

Customer Experience' and therefore `Customer Satisfaction' leading to `Customer Loyalty' has be-come the topmost priority for businesses, and year 2019 will be no different. Customers are no longer looking at their satisfaction basis the price or product being offered. Instead, they stay loyal with the companies due to the experience they receive.

Today, most markets are shrinking; companies are struggling to increase customer experience and retain their current customers. The claim that it takes seven times as much to get new customers than to hold-on to old ones is key to understanding the importance of building customer loyalty. This can only be done through measuring and managing customer satisfaction by cultivating premium customer experience.

Measuring customer satisfaction is a must have concept in companies. Companies in the past have focused exclusively on profitability, reading balance sheets and income statements. Today companies recognize that the new global economy has turned things around. Increased competition, crowded markets with little product differentiation and years of continual sales growth have mooted greater focus on existing customer retention.

Companies that are prospering in the new global economy recognize that measuring customer satisfaction by enriching customer experience is the key to their business growth. Customer satisfaction is a critical strategic weapon that can bring increased market share and increased profits.

Customer Experience means a journey which makes the customer feel happy, satisfied, justified, with a sense of being respected, served and cared, according to his/her expectation, start from first contact and through the whole relationship. Digital services and operations are raising the competitive bar in every sector including Media & Entertainment Industry. Four success factors that are key to delivering superior digital customer experiences are:

• Designing and digitizing customer journeys
• Increasing speed and agility in insight generation
• Achieving customer adoption of digital customer journeys
• Developing agility in delivering journey transformations

`Satisfaction' itself can refer to a number of different facts of the relationship with a customer. For example, it can refer to any or all of the following:

• Satisfaction with the quality of a particular product or service
• Satisfaction with an on-going business relationship
• Satisfaction with the price-performance ratio of a product or service

• Satisfaction because a product/service met or exceeded the customer's expectations

Each industry could add to this list according to the nature of the business and the specific relationship with the customer. Clearly defining and understanding customer satisfaction can help any company identify opportunities for product and service innovation and serve as the basis for performance appraisal and reward systems. It can also serve as the basis for a customer satisfaction surveying program that can ensure that quality improvement efforts are properly focused on issues that are most important to the customer.

Clearly defining and understanding customer satisfaction can help any company identify opportunities for product and service innovation and serve as the basis for performance appraisal and reward systems

So, what's the solution? The answer is `Digitalization'. If a business or brand offers online customer support, things can get much better, the customer or visitor can use it to get their queries answered and find solutions faster. According to research per-formed by McKinsey concluded that integrating digital customer service journey leads to 76 percent customer satisfaction.

Customer loyalty is the key objective of customer relationship management and describes the loyalty which is established between a customer and companies, persons, products or brands. The individual market segments should be targeted in terms of developing customer loyalty.

While Customer Satisfaction is measured by most companies, the problem companies face, however, is exactly how to do all of this and do it well. They need to understand how to quantify measure and track customer satisfaction leading to loyalty. Without a clear and ac-curate sense of what needs to be measured and how to collect, analyse and use the data as a strategic weapon to drive the business, no firm can be effective in this new business climate.

Too many companies rely on outdated and unreliable measures of customer satisfaction. They watch sales volume. They listen to sales associates describing their customers' states of mind. They track and count the frequency of complaints. And they watch aging accounts receivable reports, recognizing that unhappy customers pay as late as possible-if at all. While these approaches are not completely without value, they are no substitute for a valid, well-designed customer satisfaction surveying program.

Businesses have gone digital ­ and there's no coming back! Below are some key challenges every business faces in delivering an awesome customer experience in the new age of digital world:
1. Deliver a Personalized Experience at Every Step of the Customer Journey
2. Realizing Single Customer Profiles to gain a 360 Degree Holistic View of the Customer
3. Achieving Operational Excellence is an Essential Hygiene
4. Using Multiple Channels to Deliver a Consistent Experience

In Media & Entertainment industry in Mumbai, there is limited empirical research done in this area with regards to the foregoing customer experience and satisfaction using digital mediums and their relationship with Customer Loyalty specifically with an India context. Hence, the significance of a research becomes the need of the hour.

The research should involve in-depth interviews with media professionals and media consumption customers in phase-1. The data collection vehicle should be semi structured interviews with probing questions to create detailed blueprint of the customer's journey in the digital media consumption space in the M&E industry and their experience, satisfaction & loyalty levels.

Based on the Literature review and the results of phase-1, a structured questionnaire should be prepared to empirically test the major variables 1) satisfaction 2) value 3) experience 4) quality 5) Trust 6) Preference and their relationship to loyalty based on the functional and humanic clues. The data collected should be tabulated, edited and subjected to various statistical techniques for Univariate and Multivariate analysis using SPSS software. Hypotheses testing is proposed to be carried-out using ANOVA & Cross Tab. Based on the data collected, advanced techniques like SEM, CFA& Smart PLS should also be used. This should lead to a new and more dynamic model on the factors leading to Customer Loyalty.