There appears to be a good deal of confusion in the literature about the definition of an experience and its difference to a service. The first step is to try to clarify this, starting with the definition of a service.
There is an enormous range of services available from a vast range of organisations, including business-to-business, business-to-consumer, the public sector and voluntary organisations. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that there appears to be no single, agreed and comprehensive definition of what a 'service' is (Haywood-Farmer and Nollet 1991, Sampson and Froehle 2006). Services are sometimes defined as something intangible (see for example Gummesson 1987), however many services also include some tangible elements (Johnston and Bryan 1993). While there is as yet no agreed definition of service there are the beginnings of an emerging consensus. A product is a thing whereas a service is an activity - a process - which involves the treatment of a customer (or user) or something belonging to them, where the customer performs some role in the productive activity, i.e. the steps in the service process (Wild 1977, Sampson 2005, Sampson and Froehle 2006). Defined as such, „service‟ is much more than the point of staff-customer interaction, sometimes referred to as customer contact (Chase 1981) or the moment of truth (Normann 2000).