Design Principles for Co-Creating Digital Customer Experience in High Street Retail

While customers increasingly embrace online shopping, many retailers in high streets struggle to attract profitable customers to their stores and retain them. Establishing digital customer experiences may increase customers’ value perceptions, improving the competitive position of high street retailers. Customer experience creation in retail is a multi-faceted construct that, amongst others, depends on the service interface, atmosphere, assortment, price, past experiences, and the social environment in which retail service is co-created while customers shop. However, extant customer experience theory insufficiently accounts for the transformative power of recent mobile technology that enables digital and contextual service. In a conceptual approach, we develop eight propositions to frame digital customer experience, enabled by mobile technologies. In line with these propositions, we propose eight design principles that enable and constrain IT artifacts for co-creating digital customer experience.