Improving consumer satisfaction through shopping app features: A Kano-based approach

Most retailers offer a shopping app to their customers. Such shopping apps can include various features, such as product finding tools, wish lists, check and reserve, visual search, or augmented reality. For designing an app, retailers must know which features customers take for granted to prevent dissatisfaction and which features they appreciate to increase satisfaction. This study therefore applies the Kano model of customer satisfaction to analyze how a representative sample of 798 consumers categorize 25 app features as either must-be, attractive, one-dimensional, or indifferent. It further segments customers based on their tendencies to characterize the features and shows differences between these segments in several profiling factors, such as browsing orientation, app enjoyment, innovativeness, app usage frequency, and product involvement. This study extends existing literature by understanding how each of these features contributes to preventing dissatisfaction and increasing satisfaction and how this contribution differs between customer segments. Our study has in particular implications for designing shopping apps and targeting app design and communication of feature benefits to the identified segments.