The role of different types of online customer education content on customer experience

Details

Supervisors

STEILS, Nadia

Faculty

Louvain School of Management

Degree label

Master [120] en sciences de gestion

Abstract

Over the past years, there has been a decline in offline purchases caused by a continuous increase in online sales. The current pandemic is causing this trend to strengthen, and it is expected the pandemic will change the e-commerce landscape drastically. Since more people shop online, there is a growing rivalry between companies, which forces them to look for new ways to better attract, serve, and retain their customers. This in combination with growing customer expectations, makes that customer education is becoming a more popular concept. Educational initiatives undertaken by the company, to better inform, educate, and develop the skills and knowledge of the customers to unlock the full potential and value of the products, can be defined as customer education. These initiatives exist both online and offline. In spite of customer education being a well-researched topic, online customer education still lacks research. Particularly, the different types of content used to educate customers online and their effects on the customer experience. Therefore, this study has the aims to define the various types of online customer education content and examine the influence of these types on customer purchase intention, perceived product quality, customer expertise, customer loyalty, and perceived brand image. To examine the influence of the different defined types of online customer education content – decision-making knowledge, usage-related knowledge and skills, contextual knowledge – on the customer experience variables, an experimental design was used, which consisted of four different conditions. The experiment was conducted using a scenario-based questionnaire, which was based on the sports goods industry in the Netherlands. Several conclusions can be drawn from the results. First, decision-making knowledge was found to be the most effective type of content since it had a significant influence on all customer experience variables except for perceived brand image. The second most effective type of content was found to be usage-related knowledge and skills, which only had a significant influence on customer expertise. The last type of content, contextual knowledge, was found to be the least effective and did not influence the customer experience. Perceived brand image was the only customer experience variable that was not influenced by any type of content. This study adds to current literature on the formulation and comparison of the different types of online customer education content. Additionally, while previous research mainly focused on the offline environment, this study merely focuses on the online environment. Future research could further explore this concept in different industries and for different products to offer companies more insights into this new way of selling products.