Hybrid Customer Interaction

Excerpt

The increasing fusion of the digital and the physical world leads to new ways of customer interaction (Leimeister et al. 2014), induced by technology convergence, such as smart phones, tablet PCs and the social web (Brenner et al. 2014). For instance, customers walk down a shopping mall, utilizing their smart phone cameras to browse through available offers for products they just saw in the nearby shops. In this well-known hybrid customer interaction scenario customers are simultaneously present both in the physical world of the shopping mall and in the digital world of the mobile internet (Heinemann 2013). Technological progress and changed customer behavior, particularly the simultaneous use of multiple media, thus result in “channel hopping” (Heinemann 2013, p. 18). …