Customer experience in islamic banking: a systematic literature review

Abstract

Customer experience (CX) has become a central strategic construct in retail banking, yet its treatment within the distinctive value system of Islamic banking where service delivery is inseparable from Shariah compliance remains fragmented and under-consolidated. This review systematically synthesises the empirical literature on customer experience in Islamic banking to identify its determinants, outcomes, theoretical foundations, methodological characteristics, research gaps, and future directions. A PRISMA 2020-based systematic literature review was conducted on a Scopus dataset exported using the query TITLE-ABS-KEY("customer experience" AND bank*) (n = 899 records). The SPIDER framework guided eligibility. After removing duplicates and non-English records, title/abstract screening and full-text eligibility assessment retained eight empirical journal articles focused on customer experience in Islamic banking. The evidence base is small, recent (2020–2026), and geographically concentrated in Indonesia, Jordan, and Bangladesh. Five determinant clusters emerged Shariah compliance and Islamic ethical values, service quality, digital and technological enablers, price/value perception, and relationship/experience management while satisfaction, loyalty, behavioural intention, trust, and competitive advantage constituted the principal outcomes. Customer satisfaction consistently operated as the pivotal mediating mechanism. Methodologically, the field is dominated by cross-sectional, survey-based partial least squares structural equation modelling and tends to proxy "experience" through the service quality–satisfaction–loyalty chain rather than measuring holistic experiential constructs. This is the first PRISMA-based synthesis to isolate customer experience specifically within Islamic banking from the broader banking-CX corpus, exposing the field’s reliance on functional service-quality proxies and the near-absence of the global Islamic banking hub (Malaysia) and of experiential, longitudinal, and mixed-method designs. Islamic banks should design experiences in which functional service quality and symbolic Shariah authenticity are managed jointly, using satisfaction as the lever that converts trust into loyalty and advocacy. The review offers an integrated, evidence-based conceptual framework and a five-pillar future research agenda derived exclusively from the screened studies.