Examining the Relationship between Omnichannel Retailing, Customer Experience, and Customer Loyalty.

Abstract

As technology advancement has elevated customers’ expectations and facilitated their switching behavior, maintaining loyal customers is a complicated task in the current retail landscape. To that end, Omnichannel retailing has become a focal strategy to satisfy customers and preserve their relationship. This new phenomenon represents the natural evolution of Multichannel and cross-channel models by adopting all marketing channels and fully integrating their functionalities, promising a superior experience for customers and consolidating their loyalty. Absent from the literature, however, is a framework encompassing all dimensions of Omnichannel retailing and examining their combined effect on customer experience and loyalty. Thus, this study extensively conceptualizes Omnichannel dimensions and empirically examines this relationship. 306 surveys were distributed among customers from different cultural backgrounds to investigate the consequences of their Omnichannel perceptions. Findings indicate that only trust-related aspects of Omnichannel retailing enhance the customer experience, and that customers’ personal innovativeness negatively moderates this relationship. Moreover, customers from holistic cultures demonstrated higher Omnichannel perceptions compared with customers from analytical cultures. Practical implication of these findings is supporting retailers in applying Omnichannel strategies and highlighting response disparity of different customer segments. Further, this research helps to theoretically understand the consequences of Omnichannel retailing and customers’ behavior in this environment.