Purpose
Retail customers are now omnichannel both for attitude and behavior. Since individuals interact with multiple touchpoints throughout their shopping journey, retailers must consider all channels holistically as consumers do, in order to provide them with a unified shopping experience. Thus, recently retailers are showing an increasing interest in the deployment of advanced in-store systems aimed at enhancing the shopping experience by providing customers with innovative tools able to engage them for obtaining deeper insights, saving time and feeling more independent while shopping. Such technologies can help retailers to better react to those emerging settings by: acquiring a positive image and reputation, being perceived as innovator; reducing management costs; maintaining and acquiring loyal consumers; making imitation strategies as difficult as possible for competitors; and reaching a unique and differentiated positioning. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether and how store technology positively affects the customer experience in an omnichannel retail environment and if the early adoption of in-store technology by retailers produces a sustainable competitive advantage.
Design/methodology/approach
To achieve the research aim and deeply explore the phenomenon of interest, a multiple-case study involving 15 retailers, operating in different industries of the Italian market, was carried through 80 semi-structured in-depth interviews with store managers and employees.
Findings
Results of the content analysis show that customers are increasingly willing to use the in-store innovations in order to obtain richer shopping experiences while retailers achieve a stronger brand loyalty as well as a better and updated brand image.
Originality/value
This paper contributes to the relevant literature by proposing two conceptual frameworks. It provides a deeper understanding of possible advantages and threats resulting from early technology adoption by retailers, which is becoming essential for improving the omnichannel customer management and increasing business performance.
This panel report is available in Communications of the Association for Information Systems: https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol28/ iss1/25Volume 28Article 25
Current and Future Issues in BPM Research: A European Perspective from the ERCIS Meeting 2010Business process management (BPM) is a still-emerging field in the academic discipline of Information Systems (IS). This article reflects on a workshop on current and future issues in BPM research that was conducted by seventeen IS researchers from eight European countries as part of the 2010 annual meeting of the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). The results of this workshop suggest that BPM research can meaningfully contribute to investigating a broad variety of phenomena that are of interest to IS scholars, ranging from rather technical (e.g., the implementation of software architectures) to managerial (e.g., the impact of organizational culture on process performance). It further becomes noticeable that BPM researchers can make use of several research strategies, including qualitative, quantitative, and design-oriented approaches. The article offers the participants' outlook on the future of BPM research and combines their opinions with research results from the academic literature on BPM, with the goal of contributing to establishing BPM as a distinct field of research in the IS discipline.
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