Enhancing customer decision-making through 3D body-scan-enabled personalization in brick-and-mortar stores: The moderating roles of human support and technology intrusiveness

Brick-and-mortar stores remain vital in today’s retail landscape. To stay competitive, they must deliver experiences that go beyond what online retailers offer, increasingly relying on technology-driven personalization and convenience. Although retailers are investing in technology-enabled personalization (TEP), empirical evidence of its effectiveness remains limited. Across three scenario-based experiments and one field experiment in two product categories (lingerie and jeans), we demonstrate that TEP, specifically 3D body-scan technology, enhances decision convenience and subsequently fosters word-of-mouth (WOM) intentions, but only when human-enabled personalization (HEP) is absent. However, when HEP is present, TEP does not seem to offer additional customer benefits in this study’s context. Although we hypothesized that perceived intrusiveness would further qualify the interaction between TEP and HEP, this three-way interaction was not supported. Instead, the findings indicate that perceived intrusiveness directly qualifies the effectiveness of TEP. Specifically, when technology intrusiveness is perceived as low, TEP enhances decision convenience, which in turn fosters WOM intentions. Conversely, high perceived intrusiveness of the technology used reverses this effect, diminishing convenience and indirectly reducing WOM intentions. These findings advance retail personalization research in brick-and-mortar stores by identifying when the examined form of TEP, a 3D body-scanning technology, is most effective in a fashion retail setting and offer managerial guidance for strategically implementing this technology alongside HEP to optimize in-store experiences while safeguarding retailers' cost efficiency.