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Top1. Introduction
Information technology has been increasingly used in various businesses to enhance customer service and create operational efficiencies. Among these businesses, self-service technologies (SSTs) are services-based technologies that enable consumers to participate in the service delivery process via technological interfaces (Zhou et al., 2020). In particular, web-based self-service is a typical type of SST that has been widely adopted in e-commerce and e-service (Wang & Jeong, 2018). The increase in the use of technology in the service process shows the movement from employee-customer services to technology-customer services, in which customers mostly interact with the technology interface during service delivery (Honarzade, Mahmoudinia, & Anari, 2018; Vakulenko, Hellström, & Oghazi, 2018). A website interface serves as a window through which consumers encounter their initial experiences with an online retailer, emphasizing the vital role of websites in e-services on customer experience, a key component for customer retention and firm competence (Kandampully, Zhang, & Jaakkola, 2018).
Nevertheless, the research on customer experience in the online context is still fragmented because it lacks a unified, accurate definition and its components (Waqas, Hamzah, & Salleh, 2020). It is essential to examine the online customer experience from a multidimensional perspective (Kuppelwieser & Klaus, 2020) because it is built through the purchase journey (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). A majority of studies on online experience topics were overwhelmed with the “flow” concept (Waqas et al., 2020), a psychological state of mind, revealing a gap in which the functionality dimension of experience seems to be ignored in the literature on online customer experience. The current research aims to close this gap by integrating the technology acceptance model and flow theory to examine online customer experiences comprising functionality and psychological aspects. This study differs from previous studies by further studying the online customer experience from a more comprehensive perspective, which comprises both the functionality and psychological sides.
Besides, customer experience can vary between individual customers to the extent that they differ in how they perceive, associate, and consume experiences due to their characteristics. It is essential to consider individual factors in the study of customer experience (Lemon & Verhoef, 2016). In e-commerce research, the direct effects of self-efficacy have been studied, yet its moderating effects have received little attention (Fan, Wu, Miao, & Mattila, 2019). Therefore, the present research desires to addresses this scarcity by investigating the moderating effect of web self-efficacy, a customer trait, on customer experience in the online environment.
The hospitality and tourism industry has applied SSTs substantially in recent years, allowing traveling consumers to encounter many SSTs in their journeys. This phenomenon has received much attention from scholars and practitioners across travel and hotel services. Despite the extensive body of literature on customer adoption and readiness of technology-based services, the research on customer experience in the hospitality industry is still limited (Shin & Perdue, 2019). From the above points, we infer that investigating customer experience and its behavior outcomes should be a promising research area in the e-service context for the tourism and hospitality industry. Specifically, a model was built (Figure 1) to examine the effects of website interface attributes on customer experience and evaluate its impact on customer engagement intention in online hotel booking services, and test the moderating role of web self-efficacy among these relationships.