Abstract
Customer management becomes increasingly important as consumers have more flexible shopping process and options and competition become intensified in omni-channel (OC) retail environment. OC retailer can facilitate customer communication of OC service with OC service brand. This study evaluates an OC service brand (i.e. SSG OC service brand) to explore the effectiveness of integrated OC service platform which has a standing brand identity, and to determine the importance of selected offline characteristics of OC service on loyalty of OC service brand. Survey of 127 respondents was collected to test Partial Least Squares-Structural Equation Modeling (PLSSEM). Findings show that tangibility and empathy of offline OC service directly affect customer satisfaction and attitude toward overall OC service brand, confirming the importance of offline service quality of OC in the OC service brand management.
1. Introduction
Retailers have been working to create consistent product and service information across all multi-channels to enhance the consumer’s multichannel experience (Müller-Lankenau et al., 2006). The idea to achieve this maturity was introduced in the form of omni-channels provided to consumers and supply chain members with a holistic view of all channels (Verhoef et al., 2015). Omni-channel (OC) is synergistic management of the many available channels and customer touchpoints (TP), optimizing customer experience and channel performance across channels (Verhoef et al., 2015). OC is an emerging trend in retail with the aim of coordinating processes and technologies across all channels, to provide consistent, seamless, and reliable service to consumers (Verhoef et al., 2015; Von Briel, 2018). Thus, OC system assures the utmost information availability, visibility, and consistency across multiple channels (Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson, 2014). This provides a variety of benefits such as total revenue growth, expanded trust, synergy, and differentiation through value-added services (Kumar and Venkatesan, 2005).
5. Discussion and implications
ShinSeGae attempts to facilitate its communication with customer in its OC service system by introducing SSG which was based on a brand extension strategy. With this OC service brand, SSG provides an integrated brand experience across ten different subsidiaries by integrating data of each operation, reducing organizational silos (Hansen and Sia, 2015) Having a standing brand identity for the unified OC system was effective in connecting with consumers, since the concept and use of OC service is relatively new to customers at the time of launch. By having customers become familiar with the OC service brand name, their understanding of OC system was clearly affected. This evidently shows that branding of OC service platform can effectively facilitate customer interaction of OC (Payne et al., 2017; Wang and Hazen, 2016).
