KOREASCHOLAR

Today, customers experience a multitude of online and offline touchpoints along their shopping journeys. A customer touchpoint is defined as a direct or indirect encounter with a firm along shopping process (Baxendale et al., 2015). Touchpoints can be oneway or two-way interactions between customers and firms (Verhoef, Kannan, & Inman, 2015). Instant experiences are initiated by firms, others or by customers themselves. These experiences influence customer’s overall experience with brands, and furthermore, have impact on customers' subsequent attitude and behaviour. Another important question for managers is to decide whether to aim for creating frequent encounters: focus on volume, or creating instant experiences with stronger positive-emotional response: focus on valence. Prior research investigated different touchpoints separately and mostly focused on the effect of the volume of touchpoint encounters on attitudes and behaviour. Taking a holistic perspective, we investigate the effects of volume and valence of customers’ previous experiences of firm, others and customer initiated touchpoints on satisfaction and current purchases. We employed a real-time tracking method where respondents reported their touchpoint experiences via a mobile phones, each time they encountered the focal brand in a 4- week period in supermarket, healthcare and banking categories. We employ a twostep dynamic Heckman Probit model to investigate the impact of volume and valence of touchpoints on customer behaviour, and a multivariate regression to investigate the touchpoint effects on brand satisfaction along customer journeys. Our results reveal that brand satisfaction is mostly explained by the effect of touchpoint valence and not touchpoint volume. Our behaviour model reveals that the volume, rather than valence, of previous customer initiated purchases and transactions impacts the frequency of current purchases.

• Umut Konuş(University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
• Hugh N. Wilson(Cranfield University, UK)
• Emma K. MacDonald(Cranfield University, UK)
• Jing Li(Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)
• Fred Langerak(Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)