Customer Engagement in Omni-Channel Retailing

In recent years, there has been increasing focus on customer engagement as it has the potential for enhancing consumer relationships, profitability and growth (Hollebeek, 2011). Building customer engagement within an organisation requires some adaptation of the existing marketing mix to take advantage of new technologies and platforms and to better understand and serve customers (De Vries and Carlson, 2014). Engagement can be defined as a customer’s experience of active connection or participation with a brand, an organisation or a website (Demangeot and Broderick, 2016).

The use of multiple channels for consumer shopping is of increasing importance, aided by the availability of internet enabled smartphones and other devices (Beck and Rygl, 2015). As a result, the multi-channel shopper is fast becoming the mainstream rather than the minority shopper and retail models have changed to accommodate this new consumer (Verhoef, et al., 2015). In recent years, and with the introduction of mobile technology, use of social media, the integration of channels in online and offline retailing and the increasing number of customer touchpoints, the retail environment is facing change at an unprecedented rate. The management of customers across the different channels (Neslin, et al., 2016) and their engagement with the omni channel process requires investigation.

Although a few studies have considered customer engagement in an online context (Mollen and Wilson, 2010; Brodie et al., 2011), there is limited empirical knowledge on customer engagement in the context of omni- channel retailing and across different retail organisations, This study offers the opportunity to explore these relationships and contribute to an important field of emerging research.