Influence of Augmented Reality and Customer Service Failure in Transforming Consumers’ Attitudes and Behaviours in Online Shopping

Abstract

<p>The current study investigates the impact of consumer interactions with online retailers on consumer behaviours in the Australian context. The study has two aims. The first is to understand consumer behaviour in the purchase stage based on their experiences with augmented reality (AR) in online shopping, and the second is to explore consumers’ attitudes and behaviours towards online retailers in the post-purchase stage following customer service failure. </p> <p>With technological proliferations, AR has emerged as a transformative tool for enhancing the online shopping journeys of consumers. AR enables consumers to evaluate the quality and features of a product in an immersive environment to create personalised, enjoyable and interactive experiences. Online retailers incorporate AR in their business to enhance consumer engagement and reduce product returns and cart abandonment. So far, limited research attention has been devoted to understanding the influence exerted by AR on consumer online shopping. Therefore, this study presents a novel framework to investigate the influence of product trialability, product involvement and AR dimensions on consumers’ online purchase behaviour.</p> <p>The study also investigates consumers’ positive or negative experiences at the post-purchase stage in an online retail setting. The influence of service failure on consumers’ attitudes and behaviours, such as negative word-of-mouth, satisfaction, dissatisfaction and repurchase intentions, aligns with the extant research. This study fills the gap in the literature by exploring how regret as an emotion and service failure severity determine consumers’ online shopping behaviour. This study also explores the effectiveness of online retailers’ efforts to resolve consumer complaints following service failure to increase consumer retention and relationships. </p> <p>The current study employed the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model to unpack the influence exerted by a range of variables on consumers’ attitudes and behaviours at the purchase and post-purchase stages of online shopping. Data were collected from 363 respondents in Australia through an online survey questionnaire administered by Qualtrics. These data were analysed using SPSS, and the stated hypotheses were tested using robust statistical analyses. The results indicated that the study’s participants predominantly used AR in online shopping for hedonic purposes. These consumers rarely exhibited positive attitudes towards completing purchases online using AR. When they encountered service failure, their attitudes and actions were a result of the regret they experienced. Also, despite a favourable relationship with the online retailer, the consumers were not forthcoming in the provision of positive recommendations. Consumer regret leads to heightened dissatisfaction, which prompts consumers to share negative feedback with others to elicit their unfavourable experiences towards online retailers. The service recovery efforts of online retailers to remedy a service failure often resulted in positive consumer responses that led to repurchase intentions. </p> <p>This study offers important theoretical, practical and societal implications. From the consumers’ perspective, the study highlights that Australian consumers show reluctance to adopt AR to complete online purchases. From the online retailers’ perspective, the research findings emphasise the need for online retailers to invest in proactive communication approaches to encourage consumers to use AR to complete online purchases. At the postpurchase stage, online retailers need to focus on recovery response strategies to reduce customer dissatisfaction and negative word-of-mouth and increase consumer retention and satisfaction.</p>