“Just-walk-out” technology, which refers to cashier-less checkouts enabled by AI, is altering customer experience in the retail service industry. This involves multiple embedded technologies that can ‘observe’ items being physically removed from the shelf and automatically bill customers as they exit the store. One leading example is the Amazon Go store launched in 2018 that completely removed the physical checkout to enable the ultimate physical frictionless experience for customers. Frictionless experiences typically aim to minimise customers’ effort by reducing points that hinder them from completing their customer journeys, thus making their service encounters easier and/or faster than usual.
Despite its benefits such as higher customer satisfaction and spending, frictionless technology also brings new challenges to service providers. The physical checkout has been regarded as a high contact point for customers as retail technologies such as the self-serve checkout brings higher levels of customer involvement. When these physical interactions are removed, customers may have lower memorability of frictionless experiences, which can in turn reduce their share of wallet and loyalty.
The nascency of frictionless technology means research on it is also still limited. Few studies have examined how customer effort is related to a just-walk-out frictionless retail experience. There is also a lack of foundational understanding of customer effort outside of service convenience literature. Besides, no studies have focused on the impact of customer effort on their memorability of a frictionless experience. Addressing these gaps, this study explores the relationship between human effort and experience memorability, specifically the role of reduced effort in a just-walk-out physical frictionless experience. Two research questions are considered:
(1) How does customer effort relate to a just-walk-out physical frictionless experience?
(2) How is customer effort related to experience memorability in a just-walk-out physical frictionless experience?
Method and sample
This study employs an exploratory qualitative method by conducting semi-structured interviews with 30 participants. Participants were recruited through university social media channels using a quota sampling approach, which was a self-selection process based on accessibility, geographical proximity, and availability to participate. As the frictionless technology is new to Australia and has limited presence among retailers, the sample was not expected to have prior experience.
One of the interview questions was about attitude towards the rapid pace of technological disruption to classify participants as either ‘pro-tech’ or ‘tech-averse’. The interview then explored the research questions using a virtual scenario featuring images of the major moments during the physical frictionless experience, demonstrating how the just-walk-out technology would look like and work. All interview sessions were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, then data was coded using NVivo software.
Key findings
Results revealed four main themes that addressed RQ1:
1. In a utilitarian service experience, customers spend effort on activities that are physical, cognitive (e.g. mental planning, making decisions), and interpersonal (e.g. socialising with other people during the service encounter) to achieve their goals.
2. Customer effort is dual-valence, which means it can be either positive or negative.
3. The responses suggested that waiting is effortful through forced stagnation, as the customers are unwillingly halted in their progress. This can lead to negative psychological cost including stress, boredom, anxiety, and annoyance.
4. Moreover, removing the checkout displaces customer effort to another moment in the customer journey – facing a new logistical barrier at the beginning of the just-walk-out experience and going through a learning curve.
These relationships between a physical frictionless experience and customer effort are influenced by individual differences: (1) desire for effortful human interaction, (2) shopping value type (social vs. hedonic vs. utilitarian), (3) attitude towards technology (pro-tech vs. tech-averse), and (4) age (over vs. under 40 years).
RQ2 was underpinned by two findings.
1. Interpersonal effort enhances the impact of effort on memorability, as social interaction with service staff had great impacts on whether the service experience was memorable, and if so, whether it was positively or negatively remembered. Even quite brief and transactional social encounters via interpersonal effort can enhance customer’s memorability of the experience. Also, whether the experience was positively or negatively memorable depended on the gap between customer expectations and the service performance; this gap differed between the two age groups of over and under 40 years old.
2. Respondents suggested that not every experience should be memorable. This was revealed through desire for an unmemorable experience in the grocery store context and to conserve their ‘mental space’ for more desirable and enjoyable experiences elsewhere. One explanation for this is that experiences in the grocery store tend to be utilitarian, and the act of paying tends to be more of a dissatisfier. In a just-walk-out experience, there might be higher satisfaction if the last customer action is instead simply collecting their desired goods, which more delightful to experience and remember than the act of paying.
Recommendations
These findings have important implications for managers. First, it is recommended that managers communicate with customers about expectations of the service process, to lower the likelihood of dissatisfaction. For example, waiting time can be displayed at points of waiting, so the waiting experiences are viewed more favourably.
Second, technological touchpoints should be designed with an open systems approach. This involves considering potential customer effort that occur outside the store, specifically to set up the phone application required to enter the grocery store through the turnstile. Therefore, physical support should be provided, for example, in the form of service representatives at the store entrance, to help customer understand and prepare for the experience.
Finally, this study suggests that effective customer experience memorability should be built through human capital, not technology. This means service providers should incorporate staff into the servicescape via an opt-in engagement model to create memorable service experiences. Specifically, expert staff can be allocated to specific product lines and categories so customers can interact with staff, if they wish to do so, to meet their shopping needs.
Lead Researcher
More information
The research article is also available on eprints.