Abstract

This paper primarily intends to explore whether smartphones accelerate the customer education paradox. Smartphone usage is becoming a mainstream habit, and it is changing people's shopping experience and conventional practices, hence presenting new challenges to the market. A smartphone affects customers strongly when they are trying to choose a product/service among a variety of options, and making purchase decisions. With smartphones bringing such changes and challenges to the market, especially to the companies and stores, it is important to understand market trends in order to retain the loyalty of existing customers as well as to attract new buyers. Therefore, companies and stores should offer enhanced and better technical service quality, along with the use of tools such as QR codes. Further, mobile based websites would offer a suitable approach in assisting customers using smartphones to obtain better information of greater value. The results of this study imply that there is an opportunity for organizations to design various methods of imparting customer education by using smartphones, such as loading applications on a smartphone that lead to more information with good quality and present real benefits regarding the products/services.