Understanding Omnichannel Customer Experience through Brand Trust and Its Impact on Shopping Intention: An Abstract Chapter in Scopus uri icon

abstract

  • © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.An omnichannel experience occurs when a customer orders from multiple platforms (omnichannel retailing) and this order is filled from any location using inventory and other fulfillment assets flexible across channels (Taylor 2019). Previous literature indicates there are five omnichannel experience dimensions; connectivity, integration, consistency, flexibility, and personalization (Shi et al. 2020). Even though there are several industries impacted by the development of the omnichannel experience in the market, studies related with this topic mainly focus on retailers whose main activity is the sale of goods (Alexander and Blazquez 2020; Shi et al. 2020; Shin and Oh 2017), not services. Hence, this is particularly important to investigate considering that the omnichannel experience in the service industry is growing; specially, the entertainment and arts industry reflects a growing trend of 15% accumulated value from 2015 to 2019, representing 1.5B USD (Euromonitor 2019). Moreover, the cinema category represents one of the key drivers of this growth, reaching 58.9 million USD (Euromonitor 2019). The results revealed that three omnichannel dimensions labeled as connectivity, consistency and flexibility, were good predictors associated with brand trust, which further impact customer shopping intention. In contrast, integration and personalization were not significantly associated. Hence, this study offers insights regarding customer experience in the service industry that build on previous omnichannel experience literature (Grewal 2009; Shi 2020); particularly on customer shopping experience and how the different dimensions influence the customer behavior towards brand trust and how they impact customers shopping intention. For retail practitioners, our findings suggest that brand trust is a significant determinant when discussing a customer's shopping intention. For the service industry, the results of this study suggest that managers must focus on three dimensions. First, connectivity, that relies on a seamless unification of brick-and-mortar and online channel features, like commodities information and continuous and connected reading content across channels. Second, consistency, across channels; evenness of intangibles, like service level, performance and responsiveness. Third, flexibility; provide flexible options from one channel to the other and continuity when migrating tasks.

publication date

  • January 1, 2022