When digitalized customers meet digitalized services: A digitalized social cognitive perspective of omnichannel service usage

With the prevalence of digital technologies, various services have grown digitalized. Specific to the marketing section, multichannel has been gradually replaced by omnichannel, which aims to integrate all the physical and digital channels tightly. Although omnichannel has received considerable attention, there is still a dearth of research that theorizes the multi-faceted impacts of digitalization on omnichannel. This study thus extends social cognitive theory (SCT) to the digitalized context and contextualizes the digitalized customer and digitalized environment as mobile identity and channel integration quality, respectively. Moreover, based on the self-regulation process of human agency, we incorporate omnichannel self-efficacy, satisfaction, and habit as the agentic factors to interpret a customer's conscious (ability and expectancy beliefs) and unconscious (automatic behavioral tendency) decision-making under the omnichannel setting. Through an online survey of 401 omnichannel customers, we find support for all the proposed hypotheses. Implications and limitations of this study are further discussed.