Customer responses to personalized websites : essays on the process underlying experience

Companies increasingly personalize their website content with the aim of improving customer experience. Although the personalization process has been studied by prior research in marketing and information systems, the understanding of customer experience on personalized websites has been identified by the Marketing Science Institute as requiring further investigation. Therefore, this doctoral dissertation explores customer experience on personalized websites and the underlying processes with three essays combining quantitative and qualitative methods. The first essay shows the influence of personalization on customer experience and highlights the process underlying customers’ conscious and unconscious responses to personalization. The second essay enables a better appraisal of the process underlying the triggering and management of paradoxical tensions of personalization. The third essay further examines the backfire effects of personalization on customer experience and the role of information transparency and customer need for cognition in this process. This doctoral research contributes to research on both customer experience and personalization by providing a more holistic and iterative view of customer experience on personalized websites and the underlying psychological mechanisms. It also provides practitioners with several insights on how to provide an optimal customer experience with the personalization of the website content and how to mitigate negative responses to personalization.(ECGE - Sciences économiques et de gestion) -- UCL, 202