Why Another Customer Channel? Consumers’ Perceived Benefits and Costs of Voice Commerce

Abstract

Owing to rapidly increasing adoption rates of voice assistants (VAs), integrating voice commerce as a new customer channel is among the top objectives of businesses’ current voice initiatives. However, customers are reluctant to use their VAs for shopping; a tendency not explained by extant literature. Therefore, this research aims to understand consumers’ perceived benefits and costs when using voice commerce, based on a theoretical framework derived from prior literature and the theory of reasoned action. We evaluated and extended this framework by analyzing 30 semi-structured interviews with smart speaker users. According to our results voice commerce consumers perceive benefits in terms of efficiency, convenience, and enjoyment, and criticize the perceived costs of limited transparency, lack of trust, lack of control, and low technical maturity. The resulting model sheds light on the promoters and inhibitors of voice commerce and provides guidelines that enable practitioners to design and improve voice commerce applications.