Teaching Customer Experience Quality and its Significance in Retail Management: A Role Playing Game using Chinese Puzzle ‘Tangram’

Services are intangible in nature. For a marketing educator, it is difficult to illustrate to students the means of creating favorable customer experiences through standard lectures or case studies in a services context, considering this intangibility property. This paper describes a simple role playing game that uses the Chinese puzzle ‘Tangram’ to help students comprehend how customer experiences are shaped within and beyond a service setting. In the game, the class gets divided into two groups, individual customers and furniture retailer teams. The two groups interact with each other in buying and selling modular furniture. At the end of the game, customers share qualitative and quantitative feedback on their retailer experience, and the retailer team which obtains a high score on profitability as well as customer experience quality is declared as the winner. The debriefing session that follows the game lets students share their experiences and key learnings. The game provides the students with a scope to learn and explore the importance of customer experience quality without direct supervision from the instructor. This game requires minimal physical infrastructure. The materials required to conduct this game are easily available in departmental stores, and the monetary cost involved in deploying this game is nominal.