臺大管理論叢第31卷第3期

186 Managing Multichannel Integration, Designing Perceived Affordances, and Developing Customer Relationship in the Online and Offline Retailing satisfaction and stimulating loyalty toward their offline channel. 7. Limitations and Further Research This study is not designed to include all possible influences on the relationships between customer values, satisfaction, and loyalty. Considering the limitations of time and resource, we only assume that customers in offline channels generate positive effects that influence satisfaction and loyalty toward online channels; however, in real multichannel context, online and offline channels are two-way interactions (Pauwels and Neslin, 2015). Future studies could further explore how online channels influence satisfaction and loyalty toward offline channels. Another limitation is the exclusion of several important variables, such as brand image, habitual behaviors, privacy issues, and price. Brand image is regarded as an extrinsic cue that customers can infer service quality. Meanwhile, loyalty may result from habits. Brand image and customer consumption habits may thus affect the study results. In addition, while multichannel is used by marketing/customer services, especially from offline to online, customers voluntarily provide their personal information that businesses can thus collect, raising the privacy issue (Rust, Kannan, and Peng, 2002). Future research could discuss privacy concerns in the multichannel integration. Finally, price is unquestionably the critical cue for satisfaction and loyalty; consumers can easily access price information and discover signals from a business (Ho, Ganesan, and Oppewal, 2011). Future research could also explore how price influences the effect of multichannel integration across products in different (offline/online) environments. In accordance with prior literature and our context, customer values include economic and relational values. Economic value pertains to the benefits and cost outcomes of a core product or service, whereas relational value refers to the utility derived from the emotional or affective state that retailers engender; ambient conditions of multichannel integration also arouse the relational value of customers (Chan et al., 2010). However, it should be noted that customer values have many possible types, such as functional, emotional, epistemic, conditional, price, emotional, social, hedonic, and utilitarian values. (Bellenger et al., 1976; Sheth, Newman, and Gross, 1991). In this study, we just focus on the wellknown economic and relational values that have been acknowledged to be fundamental to customers in exchange processes (Chan et al., 2010). Although our study results show that both economic and relational values are highly operative in enhancing online and

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