Examining the Role of Customer Experience in a Multichannel Purchase Journey: Irish Students’ Perspective of Smartphone Purchase.

Rajendran, Praveen (2020) Examining the Role of Customer Experience in a Multichannel Purchase Journey: Irish Students’ Perspective of Smartphone Purchase. Masters thesis, Griffith College.

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Abstract

Marketing practices and researchers have adopted a holistic view of the customer purchase journey that advocates customer experience as a much broader aspect than service quality or satisfaction. However, as service providers offer their service through both offline (physical store) and online (web-based) channels, the customer journey has become complex, and there is a lack of understanding about customer experience in a multichannel purchase environment and its effect on channel preferences. Therefore, this dissertation examines the role of customer experience in a multichannel purchase environment by measuring the customers’ perception of the purchase journey. Specifically, this study focuses on the moment of purchase and post-purchase stage of the smartphone purchase journey in the Irish market to determine the following (1) Whether customer experience differs between online and offline channels (2) How customer experience is affected by perceived service quality and customer satisfaction (3) Effects of customer experience on channel loyalty. Quantitative data collected through an online survey from 147 postgraduate students who have purchased a smartphone in Ireland was used to perform statistical analysis and determine the role of customer experience. The findings of this research imply that customer experience is affected due to perceived service quality and overall customer satisfaction and that the customer experience affects future channel loyalty. Furthermore, it was found that, although customer experience does not differ between different channels, the channel loyalty was higher among offline channel customers, thereby indicating that customer experience is not the only determinant of channel loyalty. Although reliable findings were obtained from this study, its applications are limited to the specific context of this research. Therefore, future researchers can attempt to generalise these findings to a larger sample that represents a wider population of students or in a different smartphone market. Researchers can also examine other determinants of channel loyalty since it remains unclear why channel loyalty is higher among offline channel customers.

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