I’ll have what Alexa’s having… but only if that’s what I’m looking for! – The impact of personalization on recommendation capabilities of smart voice-interaction technology in voice commerce

With smart voice-interaction technology (SVIT) augmenting consumers’ lives, its commercial application, e.g., in voice commerce, increases. Here, SVIT can offer consumers convenience during the shopping process by giving personalized product recommendations. Focusing primarily on the technicalities, marketing research on voice commerce has overlooked consumers’ perceptions of such personalized recommendations. We test to what extent personalized recommendations impact perceived recommendation capabilities of a SVIT when consumers’ end goals are taken into account. The results of our multifactorial online experiment suggest that high personalization positively impacts consumers’ attitude towards SVIT and increases purchase intention particularly when they pursue an optimizing (vs. satisficing) end goal. Our findings suggest that highly personalized recommendations are good predictors for purchase intentions in both optimizing and satisficing conditions, whereas low personalization predicts purchase in satisficing conditions only. These results add to researchers’ understanding of consumers’ smartness perceptions and help marketers leveraging smart service value creation in practice.