Customer journeys in an omnichannel retail environment: Antecedents of satisfaction and customer coping strategies

Abstract

Customer journey has been recognised for its strengths in understanding complex customer behaviour and gaining insights into customer experience. While the term has been applied in diverse disciplines and its literature has grown more than sevenfold over the last eight years, the knowledge of the topic remains disperse and incoherent. This thesis aimed to develop a systematic understanding of the customer journey by identifying the underlying themes of the phenomenon, placing them in contexts and synthesising the current body of knowledge. Firstly, the thesis adopted a systematic review approach to identify the key aspects of the customer journey presented in the business literature up to 2020. The quantitative content analysis identified five underlying research themes of the customer journey, namely, service satisfaction, failure and recovery, co-creation, customer response, channels and technological disruption. Then, three of the identified themes were further examined in the two identified purchasing contexts. More specifically, in the service satisfaction context, the thesis examined the impact of customer co-creation behaviour, customer response and customer channel use on customer journey satisfaction. Regression analysis confirmed the significance of all factors, except information seeking and arousal in all phases and exploration in the post-purchase phase, on customer journey satisfaction. Moderator tests also revealed how the impact of each factor on customer journey satisfaction varied across three channel user segments. In the context of service failure, the thesis considered the customer coping journey that illustrated an internal process that customers went through after encountered failure incidents. The study established the link between the service satisfactory and service failure context by examining moderating effects of pre-failure customer co-creation behaviour, customer response and customer channel use on the customer coping journey. The structural equation modelling and multigroup analysis confirmed the role of the pre-failure customer journey in portending post-failure customer experience. The significant of this thesis is that it aggregated the relevant knowledge about customer journeys to date and systematised the relationships between various marketing concepts related to the customer journey. The empirical findings of the thesis offered a theoretical groundwork for future development of the topic and provided practical implications to better understand and mange customer experience.