Companies Risk Losing Customers by Ignoring What Hybrid Shopping Does to Staff
A new research framework shows that when retailers blend physical and digital shopping—self-checkout kiosks, mobile apps at stores, unmanned shops—they often optimize the technology while ignoring employee experience. The result: disconnects that hurt both worker retention and customer loyalty. Closing this gap is now critical for retail competitiveness.
Originaltitel: Piecing It Together: Bridging Customer and Employee Experience toward Phygital Congruence
<p>Contemporary service encounters increasingly occur in phygital environments, where physical and digital merge, blurring traditional boundaries and redefining human roles at the service frontline. In these hybrid settings, the technical subsystem (digital interfaces) and the social subsystem (human actors) become inextricably intertwined. Yet, many organizations continue to manage Customer Experience (CX) and Employee Experience (EMX) in functional and ontological silos. This disconnected approach, treating the frontstage and backstage as parallel tracks rather than a single system, leads to phygital gaps, where technical efficiency is achieved at the expense of human connection and system resilience.</p><p>This thesis builds on five appended papers that collectively develop a framework for phygital congruence. The research journey moves from establishing the technical micro-architecture of the frontstage (TCQ) to investigating the social mechanisms of the backstage (EMX). Through a multi-methodological approach, including conceptual development, field observations in unmanned retail, and experimental testing of automated touchpoints, the research identifies the generative mechanisms required to bridge the ontological divide between marketing-driven CX and HR-driven EMX.</p><p>The thesis contributes to the service literature by integrating these isolated domains through a Socio-Technical Systems (STS) lens, guided by a Human Experience (HX) normative compass. It yields a unified theoretical perspective where phygital congruence is defined as the state of joint optimization: where the designed qualities of the technical frontstage are perfectly synchronized with the organizational resources of the social backstage. Within this framework, human well-being is established not merely as a secondary outcome, but as a structural necessity for a sustainable service system. For practitioners, it offers actionable governance tools, such as Phygital Gap Analysis, to transition from brittle, automated interactions to coherent, human-centric service journeys.</p>