Purpose This study aims to systematize and critically analyse existing indices and frameworks on digital capabilities with the focus on consumers’ digital capabilities, identify opportunities for their further development and suggest agenda for future research. Design/methodology/approach A sample of 18 frameworks and indices of consumers’ digital capabilities were compared based on their purposes, stakeholders, scope and application areas. Findings The study concludes with propositions that generalise current views on conceptualisation, measurement and management of consumers’ digital capabilities. Each proposition is further investigated in terms of possible implications for research and practice. Practical implications The study indicates opportunities for businesses not only to consider consumers as recipients and adopters of digital technologies but also to aim to understand how to proactively involve consumers in value co-creation, help them be better educated and have a comprehensive understanding of potential outcomes of their participation in the digital economy. Social implications Highlighting individual consumer perspective in existing indices and frameworks will help consider the interests of society and provide win-win opportunities for everyone involved in the digital marketplace through bottom-up engagement in addition to top-down regulation and monitoring. Originality/value This study contributes to the extant literature threefold: firstly, existing digital capability frameworks and indices are systematized and critically investigated using criteria of stakeholders, purpose and aims; secondly, consumers are identified as principal stakeholder group whose interests are insufficiently presented in existing indices; thirdly, an integrative approach is suggested for a crucial comparison of existing indices, frameworks and their methodology with the focus on consumers’ interests.
Firms use personalization in order to influence the customer experience through numerous touch points. This influence has positive and negative consequences, which have further strong impact on the customer responses and overall success of the firm’s communication with the customer. Personalization and customer experience have the common path of their development and share the fields of applications; however, scientific literature is currently fragmented and analyzes the narrow aspects of either personalization or customer experience. This conceptual article investigates personalization with the focus on the overall customer experience journey and its use for the estimation of customer responses and touch points’ utilization. The need for this focus is based on the necessity of the firm to understand customer responses to personalization as well as the factors appearing at pre-purchase, purchase and post-purchase stages of customer decision making. The theoretical novelty of the paper embraces positive and negative consequences of personalization for identification of future empirical research directions. These conclusions include the impact of anthropomorphization through embedded automated interactive messaging, history-based and group-based recommendation systems as well as the impact of increased touch points and influence of informational vulnerability on customer trust, click-through intentions and reactance. Managerial contributions relate to the suggestions on possible actions required to either enforce particular effects with positive outcomes for customer experience or diminish negative ones in terms of technological facilitation, measurement possibilities and enhancement of information transparency.
Goal: the purpose of the current paper is to examine how five consumer characteristics (namely, hedonic shopping orientation, comparison shopping proneness, consumer confusion proneness, privacy concerns, and awareness of privacy control) influence the need for different forms of customer experience (CX) individualization. Methodology: the study is based on an online survey of a representative sample of 586 Russian online consumers conducted in mid-2021. Several consumer groups with different preferences for CX individualization are identified using cluster analysis; then multinominal logit modelling is used to define whether five consumer characteristics can predict group membership. Findings: the results empirically confirm that consumers differ in the need for CX individualization and demonstrate that all five consumer characteristics do work in predicting the need for CX individualization, but their role varies for different CX individualization strategies. Originality and contributions: the paper is the first to jointly examine three CX individualization strategies that online retailers may use to interact with customers: content personalization, product customization, and interaction humanization. The results of the study shed light on CX individualization strategies that firms should use to addressthe diverse consumer needs in their long-term strategies.
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