Technology-Enabled Personalization in Brick-And-Mortar Retail: Employee and Customer effects & Human-Enabled Personalization moderation

Abstract

Introduction Online stores boomed in recent years (Grewal et al., 2023a; Ratchford et al., 2023; Szocs et al., 2023) and are forecasted to continue growing by nearly 11 percent by 2027 (Statista Research Department, 2023). Despite the rapid growth of online sales and brick-and-mortar retailers' challenges from emerging digital and mobile technologies (Pantano & Dennis, 2019), over 80 percent of retail sales continue to occur in brick-and-mortar stores (Grewal et al., 2023a). This illustrates that brick-and-mortar stores continue to play an important role. To remain competitive, brick-and-mortar stores must create experiences that are difficult for online retailers to replicate (Grewal et al., 2023b) and must consequently invest in technology, personalization, and convenience to create this (Grewal et al., 2023a). In today’s retail landscape, many brick-and-mortar retailers struggle to provide personalized experiences (Scholdra et al., 2023). Implementing technologies can help retailers overcome these challenges (Riegger et al., 2022; Scholdra et al., 2023; Szocs et al., 2023; Wang et al., 2023). These technologies, referred to as technology-enabled personalization (TEP), simultaneously integrate physical and digital personalization dimensions using historical and real-time data, yet research on its impact on customers remains scarce (Riegger et al., 2021). Purpose The purpose of this research is fourfold. First, we investigate the effect of TEP in brick-andmortar stores on employees, an often-overlooked aspect (Grewal et al., 2023b). Second, we focus on the long-term impact of TEP on consumers, specifically customer loyalty. Third, we explore the underlying mechanisms of this effect, examining the role of decision convenience and customer experience. Additionally, we elaborate on Gahler et al.'s (2023) unified sixdimensional customer experience measure that applies across different interaction contexts, touchpoints, and journey stages. Fourth, we examine the moderating effect of human-enabled personalization (HEP) on these relationships.