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Drawing on the extant multichannel service quality literature and customer needs regarding the experiential value of online and offline shopping, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships among multichannel service delivery quality (MSDQ), customer experiences, continued engagement intentions and customer involvement.

A research model with five hypotheses was proposed. Data were collected from 911 Taiwanese consumers who had a minimum of two years of multichannel shopping experience. The consumers were asked to complete a survey about their experience with MSDQ. Structural equation modelling was adopted to analyse the data.

The results of the analysis suggest that MSDQ positively impacts customer experiences, which in turn influence their continued engagement intentions. Furthermore, the analysis found that customer involvement positively moderates the effects of MSDQ on customer experiences.

This study adopts the customer experience view to examine the effect of a holistic MSDQ design (including information transparency and accessibility and channel integration) on continued engagement intentions. By integrating a different conceptual lens, this study investigates the relationships among multichannel service quality, customer experiences and customer involvement, which adds alternative insights to the existing findings.

Managers must provide approaches to enhance the customer experiential values of utilitarianism, aesthetic appeal and playfulness; facilitate the information flow to be transparent and easily accessible; and provide different degrees of service based on customers’ experiences with their multichannel services to satisfy all consumers’ shopping needs.

The literature has focussed primarily on service providers’ technology capabilities and resources to design multichannel delivery systems. However, this study develops an MSDQ model and investigates its effects on customers’ experiences and continued engagement intentions.

As competition has been rising tremendously in the emergence and realization of globalization, some business models with regard to retailing have changed. In this sense, there has been a huge introduction to new terms and concepts related to omnichannel operations, mainly focusing on new trends in multichannel strategies. With the aid of recent technologies and changing lifestyles of customers, there exists an obvious change in shopper behavior. In this globe, multichannel operations have been detected as a means to differentiate products and services which might in return add a potential value to the success of omnichannel management strategies thereby bringing a huge value to customers. This chapter discusses main terms and terminologies, along with common practices, on how customer preferences of multichannel operations have evolved throughout the years of competition and globalization while putting the main focus of concern in multichannel marketing attempts, changes in customer preferences in this trend, and the emergence of effective strategies that enhance the best fit of marketing management theories and practices in multichannel operations. Finally, the overall initiative of this chapter is to come up with some concrete strategies that might enrich the overall standing of omnichannel management operations and practices.

This paper aims to investigate customers’ motivations and the decision-making process when choosing a channel in a “social” multichannel environment that includes social media channels, and the complementary and competitive effects compared to traditional channels within the multichannel strategy of a major European telecoms provider. A conceptual framework of multichannel customer behaviour in a “social” multichannel environment is proposed.

The study adopts an exploratory approach through 74 semi-structured interviews with customers of a major European telecoms provider who have also used social media channels to contact the company (customer-initiated contact, CIC).

Users of distinct social media channels are driven by different motivations. For instance, the social motivation for using social media is evident for Facebook users, while Twitter users are mainly driven by utilitarian considerations. Although users of different social media channels represent distinct segments in terms of behaviours and motivations, complementary effects among channels (new and traditional) are generally detected in the sense that a better customer experience is driven by the presence of multiple channels.

Data collection was performed for only one company in one industry and should be extended to other industries, although our results were confirmed by discussions with social media managers of other companies.

The research offers suggestions to develop multichannel strategies in a “social” multichannel environment.

This study advances knowledge in the multichannel management field by investigating why and how customers utilize channels in a multichannel environment that includes social media channels. The authors develop a conceptual framework of multichannel customer behaviour for CIC in a “social” multichannel environment.

This research aims to investigate the moderating influence of both multichannel and multicompany usage on the impact that customer satisfaction has on share of wallet (SOW).

The data used in the analyses were collected as part of both survey and transactional data of 802 households of a large financial services provider. Within class regression models were employed to test the moderating effects of different segments that were identified based on multichannel‐multicompany customer differences.

The findings confirm that using multiple channels has an overall positive moderating impact on the satisfaction‐SOW link and that customer satisfaction matters more when the customer adopts multiple channels; online channel usage in addition to offline usage. Furthermore, this effect is even more pronounced for customers that transact with multiple providers. That is, the group of customers that use both the company's and competitors' offline and online channels reveal a higher satisfaction‐SOW association than the group of customers that only adopted the offline channel with the company and competitor.

This study broadens the understanding of multichannel behavior by comparing single (offline) and multiple channels (offline and online) for customers of multiple companies (two competitors).

Consumers display complex shopping behaviors in the multichannel environment, which includes traditional retail stores and the internet. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of the customer-sales associate relationship, customers’ receptiveness to online store shopping, and their interaction effects on the customer’s attitude toward multichannel shopping behavior when the firm decides to establish an online store as the online channel. The authors also examine how customers’ multichannel shopping behavior affects their future spending intentions.

Survey data were collected by soliciting 231 customers who purchased cosmetics in department stores within the past three months. Subjects were asked to give their overall evaluation of their offline and online shopping experiences in the last three months.

Results show that the customer-sales associate relationship significantly reduces customers’ attitude toward searching offline but purchasing online. Receptiveness to online store shopping has significant effects on customers’ attitude toward multichannel shopping behaviors regardless of whether they search or purchase via the online channel. The customer-sales associate relationship also moderates the relationship between customers’ receptiveness to online store shopping and multichannel shopping behaviors. Finally, unlike other types of online and offline multichannel shoppers who display higher future spending intentions when the physical store decides to open an online store, those who prefer physical stores for both information searching and product purchasing display lower spending intentions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to use customer-sales associate relationships to investigate consumers’ attitude toward multichannel shopping behavior. The findings provide meaningful implications for service providers that use sales associates to increase consumers’ value via face-to-face service, but find it challenging to go online.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how multichannel customers evaluate overall satisfaction across distribution channels and what the antecedents are of such satisfaction.

A survey of bank customers in Taiwan was conducted. The total number of valid questionnaires was 479. Reliability and validity were tested. Maximum likelihood procedure of LISREL 8.8 was used to test the hypothesized structural equation model.

The findings indicate that the overall satisfaction in the multichannel environment is a critical determinant of customer retention and participation. The present study also develops the antecedents of multichannel satisfaction. In the multichannel environment, perceived multichannel service quality is positively related to satisfaction, while perceived channel switching difficulty is negatively related to satisfaction.

The present study employs the stimulus‐organism‐response (S‐O‐R) paradigm and the channel loyalty framework to better model customers' response to marketing activities in the multichannel distribution system.

Drawing on open systems theory, this study aims to investigate the direct and moderating effects of information collaboration in the pre-sale stage, transaction management collaboration in the transaction stage and customer service collaboration in the post-sale stage on the linkages of the online–offline store image and the market performance of small sellers.

Data were collected from multiple sources, including self-reported and online objective data from 148 small restaurants that simultaneously sell online and offline, for validating the developed research model. Partial least squares-based structural equation modeling was used for data analysis.

This study illustrates the direct effects of an online store’s image and online–offline collaborations on the market performance of small stores. This study further reveals the boom-bust moderating effects of different collaborations between online–offline images and market performance.

Small stores should be aware of the importance of information congruence and functional integration concerning online–offline collaboration. They should also recognize the paradoxical intervening effects of online–offline collaboration on different channels and arrange appropriate collaboration tactics.

This study presents a significant contribution to the open systems theory by revealing both constructive and destructive properties of the online–offline collaborative system with offline-to-online targeting. Vertically differentiated online–offline collaboration may strengthen one side of the store image but weaken the other side for promoting the market performance of small stores.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of multichannel integration quality in enhancing online perceived value and online purchase intention via the online store operated by a land-based retailer.

This paper develops a research model based on the “quality-value-purchase” chain, with four dimensions of multichannel integration quality as antecedents and three dimensions of online perceived value as mediators of online purchase intention. Empirical data were collected from 390 multichannel shoppers and structured equation modeling was used to test the research hypotheses.

Among the four multichannel integration quality dimensions, transparency of service configuration, process consistency and business ties positively affect online purchase intention through online perceived value, whereas the effects of information consistency are not significant; process consistency exerts a stronger influence on online perceived value than business ties; the effect of online convenience on online purchase intention is weaker than that of online monetary savings and online hedonic value.

The study identifies the theoretical principles of the relationships among multichannel integration quality, online perceived value and online perceived value in multichannel context. Based on these theoretical principles, this study will help researchers to better understand consumers’ online purchase intention and the creation of online perceived value in the integrated multichannel context.

The findings of this study can provide retailers with useful strategies to increase online purchase intention depending on improvement of multichannel integration quality and online perceived value.

This study provides a first study to empirically assess various types of online perceived value attached to multidimensional properties of multichannel integration quality and the corresponding effects on online purchase intention. Overall, the results offer insights of how land-based retailers could manage their online performance by integrating multiple channels and improving online perceived value.

The purpose of this paper is to present a multichannel segmentation approach to identifying customer segments based on actual customer channel usage in the post-purchase phase in the health insurance industry.

A multinomial regression model and count regression models were estimated to describe the profiles of customer segments and the frequency of channel usage based on generations and sociodemographic variables.

This study identified generational differences in channel usage. Single female customers from the Pre-Boomer or Baby Boomer generation and customers living in states with lower incomes are more likely to use call centres. Website users tend to live in regions with higher per capita income. Multichannel users are, on average, more frequent users of both the website and call centres. In terms of sociodemographics, they display a more heterogeneous profile.

The proposed segmentation needs to be enriched with additional variables such as customers’ health status or channel usage motivations.

Customers, who are male, married and from Generations Y and X, are more likely to use the website. Their propensity to switch to a digital channel could be investigated further to develop targeted migration strategies. Multichannel users are, on average, more frequent users of all channels. To avoid increased channel costs, segments should be analysed in terms of their size and profit potential to help allocate marketing investment more efficiently.

As opposed to existing research, the proposed segmentation approach is based on transactional data of channel usage from a real company, combined with analyses using generations and sociodemographic variables.

The purpose of this paper is to review state‐of‐art literature on adoption of CRM technology, including the CRM in multichannel environment and provide a comprehensive view of insights gained in this area of research through the bibliography.

All together, nine databases were searched on the basis of four main descriptors which provided identification of 812 articles. A close review of the abstracts of these articles led to selection of 123 articles which were found relevant. Each of these articles was further reviewed and classified based on the main channel of CRM implementation. The articles were further classified in sub‐categories under each main channel theme.

The selected articles were categorized under four main themes based on the channel – CRM, multichannel CRM, eCRM, mCRM. The articles in the CRM category were mainly focused on the strategic alignment along with research on increasing customer loyalty and use of data mining in CRM. Under the multichannel CRM theme the articles were further classified under eight categories – CRM (articles focusing on overall CRM implementation on multiple channels and related issues), eCRM (articles related to CRM implementation on online channel and its impact in multichannel environment), IT, Marketing, Sales, Service, Strategy, and Mixed (articles addressing two issues simultaneously: Marketing and IT).

The bibliography provides a comprehensive academic literature published between 2006 and 2010 covering all the channels of CRM implementation – traditional, electronic and mobile – along with studies specifically focused on issues dealing with multichannel environment.