Habitual behaviour: design for automaticity during customer loyalty decisions

It is widely acknowledged that a majority of customers' decisions are habitual in nature - that is, rooted in repeated behaviour performed automatically in familiar contexts and involving limited cognitive processing. Given that habits have received remarkably little attention in extant customer loyalty research, this chapter focuses on how such habitual behaviour is formed, maintained, and altered. After taking stock of current research of habitual behaviour in a customer loyalty context, we develop a conceptual framework that synthesises key drivers and dynamics in the formation and maintenance of habitual behaviour. Given the topic's managerial relevance, we turn to service design to translate the framework into an actionable process to develop "sticky" customer experiences. An illustration using digital voice assistant technology demonstrates the potential for creating and maintaining habit-based loyalty in a digital context where low switching costs make it typically difficult to achieve customer loyalty.