Understanding Customer Experience on Personalized Websites: An Abstract

Abstract

Online customer experience comprises all subjective responses consumers may have when interacting with a website (Rose et al. 2012). Companies have long recognized that providing optimal customer experience has become a key challenge (Ho and Bodoff 2014; Lemon and Verhoef 2016). To address this challenge, worldwide companies have developed personalized websites with the aim of improving customer experience on their website (Ho and Bodoff 2014). Personalization enable them able to learn from their online consumers’ data and tailor website content accordingly (Bodoff and Ho 2014). Prior research suggests that personalized content is generally more efficacious than non-personalized content (e.g.: Bodoff and Ho 2014; Tam and Ho 2006). However, despite companies’ effort to personalize content, discrepancies may occur between actual and perceived personalization such that a non-personalized content might be perceived as personalized and a personalized content might be perceived as not personalized (Komiak and Benbasat 2006; Li 2016). While actual personalization relates to the adaptation of content initiated by the system, perceived personalization refers to the extent to which consumers perceive a message as personalized (Li 2016). Li (2016) recently showed that perceived personalization, instead of personalization, generates favorable responses. With this research, our objective is to extend Li (2016)‘s study by investigating how personalization affects online customer experience and especially its playfulness dimension. We developed a personalized furniture website to carry out a between-subject lab experimentation. A first study shows that perceived personalization (no matter what is actually done on the website), has a positive impact on website playfulness, instead of actual personalization. This effect is mediated by content congruence. Our research will have both theoretical and managerial contributions. We first contribute to the literature on customer experience by examining online customer experience on personalized websites. Second, this research aims at providing companies levers for action to implement personalization processes that improve online customer experience.