Customer Experience in Vietnamese Coffee Stores: A Multidisciplinary Study

Abstract:

Creating a superior customer experience is one of the key objectives in today’s retail environment (Islam et al., 2019). The holistic nature of the customer experience is created by the elements that the retailer can control (e.g., brand perception, service interface, retail atmosphere, assortment, price), but also by elements that are beyond the retailer’s control (e.g., influence of others, purpose of purchase), and it encompasses the customer’s cognitive, affective, emotional, social, and physical responses to the retailer (Verhoef et al., 2009). In Vietnam, coffee consumption is continuously growing with the opening of new stores by international and local brands (Tran et al., 2020) and Generation Z is a strong consumer (Nguyen, 2020). Although the importance of in-store customer experience has been recognized and the number of new coffee shop openings in Vietnam is increasing, further research is needed to understand Generation Z’s in-store experience. Moreover, despite the holistic nature of the customer experience, previous research has mainly focused on qualitative methods such as surveys and questionnaires, while the service literature is calling for multidisciplinary research that combines qualitative reports with quantitative methods (Verhulst et al., 2019). The purpose of the study is to gain a deeper, more accurate understanding of the holistic in-store customer experience, and its relationship to Vietnamese Generation Z by combining mystery shopping questionnaires with a shorter version of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) (Greenwald et al., 2003). 200 participants completed the study with the following task in the city of Ho Chi Minh: they participated in the IAT pretest and posttest, visited their assigned coffee store, either Starbucks Vietnam or The Coffee House, and then completed a mystery shopping questionnaire about their customer experience in the store. The results of this study show that combining mystery shopping questionnaires with IAT can improve the understanding of Generation Z holistic customer experiences in stores. Second, the IAT results suggest that this method can be effectively applied to measure how in-store customer experiences influence Generation Z brand perceptions in the short-term, helping retailers to optimize the brand customer experience interaction and understanding what strategies will have the most positive influence on the Generation Z.