Abstract
Through the emergence of convenience-seeking customer culture, retailers and shoppers have begun to make use of technological innovations, such as social media and mobile applications for their retail experiences to expand their channel options. The advent of multiple channel shopping has indeed led to complicated customer shopping journeys. To address the complications created by the multiple channels, retailers began to integrate their systems across channels to provide a more consistent and unified experience. This development was named omni-channel retailing. As a result, the need to optimise the various channels at each stage in the customer journey became obvious. For this reason, the present study endeavours to ascertain how customers’ interaction with different channels provided by omni-channel retailers – at each stage of their journey – influences their experience, satisfaction and loyalty to the omni-channel retailers.
The theoretical models used included Goal theory, Stimulus-Organism-Response, and the expectations confirmation theory. Each of these theories deals with different constructs. This study made use of a quantitative research design of which the population was made up of South African shoppers who had conducted shopping through an omni-channel retailer in the previous three months. Simple random sampling was used to survey 250 respondents across the three stages of the omni-channel customer journey. These stages were measured using a multi-cross-sectional approach measuring the pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase stages separately. The findings of this research illustrated that different channels of interaction, regardless of use frequency, have differing impacts on the customer’s experience. Each stage offers an array of unique channel interactions between the customer and the retailer. This study also identified which channels to focus on at each stage of the customer journey. Moreover, the experiences of the customers during these interactions are important for retailers to consider as experience was found to impact both satisfaction and loyalty significantly, across all three stages. As this is a considerably new field within retailing, more research should be directed towards understanding how experience may be impacted by different retailers with different channel configurations as these can be complex and diverse.