Understanding the Omnichannel Customer Journey: Determinants of Interaction Choice

Through the proliferation of channels and ways to engage in these channels, customers today have an unprecedented range of options to individualize their customer journeys. This study attends to the resulting complexity by investigating the overt and underlying reasons for customers’ interaction choices along the omnichannel customer journey. Data collected from focus groups, expert interviews, and laddering interviews with motor insurance customers illustrate that omnichannel customer journeys are inherently individualistic but driven by three types of effects. Some effects apply to singular interaction choices and are hence journey independent, while the strength of inertia between subsequent interactions depends on customers’ satisfaction with the interaction. Customer journey patterns, which pertain to specific portions of the journey, include research shopping and the novel impersonalization/ interactivity reduction effect. Our findings further provide additional explanations for these customer journey patterns and customers’ limited motor insurance search efforts. Based on the ultimate underlying motives for interaction choice, the four types of value-in-use customers seek in their interactions, a segmentation approach that is more effective than predominant efforts using observable interaction behavior is suggested.