Although researchers believe that these cutting-edge technologies can improve the customer experience, empirical evidence supporting this belief is scarce. With the rapid development of smart technologies, it is worth exploring how these technologies contribute to the retail customer experience. A recent report predicted that smart retail technology's global market size would grow by approximately 20% to reach $35.64 billion by 2020. The various smart retail technologies include touch screens, interactive displays, nearfield communication, tablets, and QR codes, among others. Over the past few years, an increasing number of traditional retail stores have incorporated smart retail technologies into their day-to-day practice and created smart partnerships between retailers and consumers. "Smartness" refers to enhancing processes and efficiency on the retailer side and improving satisfaction and utility on the consumer side. The concept of smart retail emerged from the smart city phenomenon. In particular, the contemporary retailing landscape triggered by smart retail technologies (SRTs) has posed new challenges to customer experience management (CEM). The concept of "customer experience" was first introduced in 1982 by Hobrook and Hirschman, emphasizing "experiential perspectives of consumption." To date, researchers have conducted exploratory studies on the concept and dimensions, the measurement, the antecedents and consequences, and the moderators of the customer experience. Improving the customer experience is a challenge for practitioners and academic researchers. However, significant disparities exist between what firms believe they offer their customers and what customers actually experience during their customer journey. According to a Forbes survey, 86% of customers will pay more for a better customer experience. Customers make purchase decisions based on their experiences. An increasing number of retail firms view the customer experience as a strategic differentiator that can give them sustainable competitive advantages. The customer experience is a growing priority for both practice and research. In addition, they should emphasize the increase in CLV, as this increase enhances the positive relationship between socio-technical stimuli and the customer experience, making customer experience management more efficient. Retail managers should make full use of smart retail technologies to improve the customer experience. (3) The customer experience has a positive influence on relationship quality in the retail industry. (2) CLV has a positive moderating effect on the relationship between socio-technical stimuli and the customer experience. (1) WeChat m-payment-based smart retail technology can enhance the customer experience by improving customer-perceived relationship orientation, employee-customer interaction, and communication effectiveness. The proposed framework was empirically tested based on transaction and survey data of 462 WeChat m-payment retail customers. We also developed hypotheses regarding the moderating role of customer lifetime value (CLV), which is considered an important customer characteristic. Based on the stimulus-organism-response (SOR) paradigm, we investigated the relationships among socio-technical stimuli, the smart retail customer experience, and relationship quality. The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of WeChat mobile-payment (m-payment)-based smart technologies in improving the retail customer experience and to develop an integrated framework of the smart retail customer experience including antecedents, consequences, and moderators.
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