Driving to the store, finding parking, defective carts, difficulties in finding items, poor product info, long lines for checkout, unclear receipts, carrying heavy shopping bags home, and forgotten items are some of the most common barriers experienced by grocery shoppers. These are also the most common reasons why shoppers decide to switch to alternative retailers or to online grocery channels. COVID-19 accelerated this trend with online grocery shopping and home delivery services became prevalent and grew significantly during the pandemic (Gupta & Mukhejee, 2022). Today, e-grocery has reached 11% of the total grocery sales and being expected to reach 19% by 2025 in US (source: Statista, 2022). Brick and mortar grocery retailers declare to suffer from low loyalty of their customer and margin pressure. On the other side, the recent investments of online pure players such as Amazon and Alibaba in physical retail, including grocery, show that the physical shopping has still potential to lead retailers’ growth, also within grocery. Grocery retailers should therefore find new ways to attract and retain customers to their stores. Offering a better customer experience (CE) may be a valuable strategy to this end. A great CE has emerged at the base of a sustainable competitive advantage for companies, and it is at the heart of customer loyalty (Grewal et al., 2017) in several sectors but has often been neglected within grocery selling.

Metaverse tourism is blurring the boundaries between the virtual and physical worlds. Among the core technologies in the metaverse world (e.g., Avatar, Virtual reality, Augmented reality, NFTs, etc.), the avatar has the potential power to revolutionise customer experience. Destination management organisation (DMO) can boost customers’ immersion through effective avatar customer journey design (ACJD) in the metaverse world. Yet, there is a lack understanding of how practitioners view an effective ACJD in the metaverse world. This study aims to explore the role of avatars on customer journey design in a metaverse tourism program (e.g., Dunhuang) from practitioners’ perspectives through a qualitative study. This study advances theoretical understanding about metaverse tourism in the tourism literature, and provides important implications for tourism industry on how to design tourist experiences in metaverse tourism.

This paper is aimed at proposing a new approach to connecting the measurements of customer satisfaction on healthcare services with the prioritized identification of healthcare service processes to be improved. As customers’ requirements for healthcare services have become too diverse and healthcare service systems have been increasingly complex, there has been growing interest in the customer-oriented evaluation of healthcare service quality and the systematic improvement of healthcare service processes. Most of the previous studies on service quality evaluation are based on SERVQUAL model. However, because of the unique characteristics and constraints inherent in healthcare service systems, it has been reported that SERVQUAL would be inadequate to be applied to healthcare service systems. As an alternative, SERVPERF has recently been widely used in the evaluation of healthcare service quality. However, there is a lack of studies on how to use the measurements of healthcare service quality systematically to improve service functions and processes. With this issue in mind, we firstly measured the customer-perceived satisfaction on the healthcare service quality from the six dimensions based on SERVPERF. Then we identified the relationships between the subjective measurements and healthcare service processes through brainstorming and expert interview. By using the relationships, we developed a customer journey map in healthcare services that visually describe the interaction between customers and healthcare service systems. The developed customer journey map would help service designers easily identify a healthcare service process that needs to be improved with priority. It is expected that the design improvement process proposed in this study would be a useful method for enhancing the quality of healthcare services.