AR and the retail customer experience

experience. It includes the dimensions of contextual conditions, employee-customer interactions, customer journeys, co-created experiences, consumer-consumer influences, personal characteristics, sequential effects, and negative impressions.

• Integrated Customer Experience Framework: This framework (Saini and Singh, 2019) considers service excellence, CROI, aesthetics, and playfulness to create a frictionless or pleasurable customer experience, resulting in a behavioral response.

Table 14 below summarizes the dimensions from the different frameworks and models described (Havif, 2017). The review of papers to understand retail customer experience shows that several models emerged in reaction to changes in the market environment. Most of the authors use the dimensions of customer experience devised for their specific research. There is an overlap in dimensions between the different frameworks and models studied, and there is no universal framework or model or variations of one.

Table 14. Overview of the dimensions of most used customer experience theoretical frameworks and models

Next, an extant review was conducted on how AR related to retail customer experience, to determine the customer experience dimensions and theoretical framework, model, or variation to serve as the basis for my research analysis.

as smartphones and tablets, allowing users to shop using AR apps (Rauschnabel, 2018), thereby enhancing satisfaction and experience (Dacko, 2016; Javornik, 2016).

Three crucial characteristics that define an AR technology are vividness or quality of augmentation, interactivity, and informativeness. Several authors have pointed their attention towards these attributes (Huang and Liao, 2015; Pantano, Rese, et al., 2017; Rese et al., 2014; Yim et al., 2017). These features can be considered important measurement tools to explore AR's possible impact on customers and their interactions with the technology (Pantano, Rese, et al., 2017).

Vividness is an essential characteristic of AR technology since both task completion and user feelings are strengthened by the realism and the quality of the medium (Lo and Lie, 2008). The degree of vividness is crucial to assess an experience (Lombard and Snyder-Duch, 2001). The possibility of interacting with AR that presents vivid and realistic 3-D animations of a specific product generates a feeling of being part of the experience (Faust et al., 2012; Ryan, 1994).

Interactivity refers to the user's expectation to interact easily with a device (Wang et al., 2015). AR-based systems on mediums such as smartphones and tablets, offer larger interactivity capabilities than desktop and in-store mediums. Interactivity directly impacts users' reactions and therefore influences their valuation regarding AR (Hoffman and Novak, 2009). It is considered interactive in that it lets users interact and modify the augmented setting (van Noort, Voorveld, and van Reijmersdal, 2012).

Interactivity and vividness have been defined as antecedents of the effectiveness and the enjoyment of AR (Jiang and Benbasat, 2007; Yim et al., 2017).

The informativeness level has been identified as another significant predictor of users' attitudes towards a technology (Chen and Tan, 2004; Chen and Wells, 1999). In particular, Hausman and Siekpe (2009) consider it to be of great importance. Along with its implicit capacity to deliver experiential value to customers, AR can reduce their uncertainty in the decision-making process (Dacko, 2017). Customers want and expect to find useful information in an easy and fast manner to support their actions and decisions (Fassnacht and Koese, 2006).

Findings from the extant review

AR retail applications included virtual try-on using personalized or non-personalized virtual models showing how apparel products (and combinations) would look. Interactive displays provide information on promotions, products, and locations (Bonetti et al., 2017; Hwangbo et al., 2017). Subsequently, AR technology has evolved, and substantial growth of mobile AR took place via smartphones and tablets (Javornik, 2016; Rauschnabel, 2018).

AR can improve consumers' visualization of products, increase engagement, and enhance perceptions of the shopping experience, thereby positively affecting retailer and brand perception. This, in turn, can influence consumer behavior (Huang and Liao, 2015; Hwangbo et al., 2017; Kannan and Li, 2017;

McCormick et al., 2014; Poncin et al., 2017; Willems et al., 2017). Consumers' perceived control and autonomy enhance the retail experience in technology-mediated retailing (Poncin et al., 2017). Letting consumers maintain a degree of control while maintaining a degree of challenge, designed to increase user perception of their competence, leads to consumers' perceived enjoyment and increased shopping effectiveness, control, and convenience (Roy et al., 2017). Overall, this impacts positively on customers' perceptions of the retailer and their behavioral intentions (Roy et al., 2017). At the same time, however, information accessibility and consumers' perception of company control over the collection and use of personal information may lead to privacy concerns (Inman and Nikolova, 2017; Kannan and Li, 2017).

Dacko (2017) identifies two different kinds of explicit benefits that AR offers to consumers: extrinsic benefits such as efficiency and greater value, and intrinsic benefits such as entertainment. This concept reinforces other academic research, suggesting that hedonic and utilitarian components affect consumer behavior throughout the experience (Hsiao et al., 2016; Lusch and Vargo, 2006; Wang, Malthouse, and Krishnamurthi, 2015). Similarly, service experiences are judged in terms of both hedonic and utilitarian value (Bauer, Falk, and Hammerschmidt, 2006), where the first refers to the experiential enjoyment (emotional value) and the second to the performance-related effectiveness of the service encounters (cognitive value) (Hilken et al., 2017).

According to Pine and Gilmore (1998), the customer experience develops around the two dimensions of customer participation and environmental relationship. Consumers perform key roles in co-creating the experience; the latter ranges from absorption to immersion, where the customers feel part of the

experience (Pine and Gilmore, 1998). Users must be allowed to live their association with the brand in a delightful way to add value for the customers and create memorable experiences (Sorooshian, Salimi, Salehi, Nia, and Asfaranjan, 2013).

Online shopping increases and provides customers with the products and services traditionally present in offline experiences (Yim et al., 2017). It includes virtual try-ons, try-out tools, and training where customers get vivid contextual information. In offline settings, AR provides customized and interactive information previously absent in physical settings (Olsson et al., 2013). This is via the additional integrated value that AR enables, like personalization and authentication via analytics and big data (Bermejo et al., 2017). By providing varying levels of information on products and services, AR provides virtual tagging product ratings and details about products, providing customers immediate access to social communication. AR enhances the customer experience by merging the physical world's

touch-and-feel with highly vivid, customized, and connected digital content. It naturally blends online and offline experiences to overcome the limitations of any individual distribution channel. For managers, AR addresses the concerns of showrooming and webrooming and maintains customers as they switch between channels during their journey (Olsson et al., 2013).

AR provides for novel in-store experiences and increased engagement by providing seamless access to digital content in offline settings, traditionally available only to online shoppers. Like the filter

functionalities of online shops, recent AR applications also let customers visually highlight or de-saturate products in the physical assortment to personalize their choice set. AR offers firms a powerful tool to create memorable in-store experiences, increase the fun, and the time spent in-store. It delivers on digital customer experience imperatives for offline retail in several ways (Deloitte, 2016): by offering better price comparisons, by providing the ability to browse products and navigate assortment, including enhanced information about product features, variations, and availability. From an omnichannel perspective, augmenting the in-store experience promises to promote store loyalty while counteracting customers' loss to online shops, reduced in-store traffic, and showrooming behavior.

Integration of AR with other technologies like AI, Big Data, IoT, Payments can create value-added services for retailers and consumers to improve the retailing and shopping experience. It enables

personalized product offers, preferred delivery methods, and improved decision-making (Bermejo et al., 2017).

Using integrating elements into the online environment, AR offers multiple opportunities to enable omnichannel customer experiences. It addresses concerns in the online environment related to product trials, leading to abandonment, product returns, and webrooming behavior. AR applications empower customers to try-on, selecting make-up or try-out products as if they were in an offline physical

experience. It provides customers with authentic experiences in their shopping journey via an embedded offering, virtually present in an appropriate personalized environment (Huang and Liu, 2014). Hilken et al. (2017) studied the utilitarian and hedonic value of AR by proposing a fit with the situated cognition model that customers preferentially use in everyday shopping situations. AR's uniqueness in the online channel is that, by focusing on these conceptual dimensions, it affords customers the means to directly examine offerings in a personally relevant context.

Customer-to-customer connectivity is increasingly important to deliver omnichannel customer

experiences (Verhoef et al., 2017), and the early absence of AR social features has been a limiting factor in the technology's proliferation (Javornik, 2016a). Recent applications have begun to address this limitation by enabling extended AR experiences. This highly visual, context-sensitive form of

communication enables peer customers to become active contributors to shared customer experience (Scholz and Smith, 2016) rather than being limited to "liking" or commenting.