Paving the Way for Digital Transformation: Investigate Customer Experiences of Using Mobile Apps

Abstract

Background: Mobile apps have become a critical channel for retailers to interact with their customers and digitalize shopping behaviors in the customer journeys. In the transition of digital transformation, convenience stores have launched mobile apps to interact with and particularly collecting data from their customers. It is critical to investigate customer experiences in using mobile apps because it paves the way for successful digital transformation. This paper aims to investigate the customer experiences of convenience stores’ mobile apps from the online reviews. Method: This study proposed a mobile apps quality model as the theoretical framework to empirically test the online reviews of mobile apps. Large volumes of online reviews generated by customers provide important strategic values for business and service design for mobile apps. This paper collected 40,521 online reviews of two leading convenience stores in Taiwan and analyzed with text analysis and qualitative analysis. Results: Applying text analysis and qualitative analysis, this paper identified the critical quality attributes of mobile apps in the convenience stores that need to be improved. In addition, software quality is the major concern that 7-11 Open Point needs to improve, followed by service quality and information quality respectively. Software quality is also the major concern that FamilyMart app needs to improve the customer experiences, followed by service quality and information quality. Moreover, customer dissatisfaction primarily resulted from problems in software quality and information quality. Instead, convenience, ease of use, and practicability of mobile apps lead to customer satisfaction. Conclusion: The results demonstrate that software quality, information quality, and service quality are critical dimensions in affecting customer experiences in using mobile apps. Although different mobile apps may have different priorities of quality attributes that are needed to be improved, these improvements of mobile apps help to enhance customer experiences and accelerate digital transformation of the convenience stores.