Do as You Say, or I Will: Retail signal congruency inbuy‐online‐pickup‐in‐storeand negativeword‐of‐mouth
研究了零售商在线上购买线下取货（BOPIS）服务中，服务失败后信号一致性如何影响消费者满意度和负面口碑意愿，发现信号一致性取决于运营能力和产品类别，对零售品类管理有启示。
Abstract Buy‐online‐pickup‐instore (BOPIS) services have become an increasingly important part of a retailer's omnichannel strategy. When service failures (e.g., stock‐out) occur, consumers may resort to negative word‐ofmouth (NWOM) to share their evaluation of the retailer's BOPIS service. While a retailer's service recovery policies (e.g., cross‐channel substitution) may help to fulfill its service intent, the extent to which these two signals can improve consumer satisfaction and diminish their NWOM intent remains unknown. Drawing from both service recovery literature and signaling theory, we conducted a series of five experiments and find that the intradimensional congruity of the signal set communicated by the retailer during its BOPIS service process depends on both its operational capability and the consumer's own predilection regarding the product category. These insights collectively indicate that while a retailer's operations need to support service policies to provide a congruous BOPIS service process, substitution policies offered to consumers during the transaction need to consider the extent to which a consumer's purchase decision is hedonic or utilitarian. In turn, this finding suggests that a retailer's category management needs to consider BOPIS substitution in terms of both product assortment and inventory policies.