M.H.P. Kleijnen

Customer Adoption of E-service: an Experimental Study

So far, the term e‐commerce has been primarily associated with communicating the brand and/or enabling sales transactions. However, the next vista for companies operating in the virtual marketplace seems to be e‐service or, delivering value‐added, interactive services to customers. This e‐business function has been left virtually unexplored in the services research literature. In this article, an attempt is made to investigate the impact of organizational reputation, relative advantage, and perceived risk on perceived service quality, trust and behavioral intentions of customers towards adopting e‐services. In the context of an electronic travel service, hypotheses on the relationships between aforementioned variables are investigated by means of an experimental study. The results suggest that the three factors have a significant main effect on the customers’ attitude and behavior towards e‐service. The only exception is that relative advantage does not appear to have a significant impact on customer trust. The results also show that organizational reputation and perceived risk have a combined effect: a good organizational reputation impacts the effect of perceived risk on the three dependent variables. Finally, the three factors appeared to be evenly important in the forming of customers’ attitude and behavior. Again, the only exception is that organizational reputation and perceived risk appear to be more important in terms of trust than relative advantage.

Image Congruence and the Adoption of Service Innovations

In this article, the authors investigate whether the fit between consumers’ image and the image of an innovation, commonly referred to as image congruence, has an impact on customers’ attitudes toward innovative services as well as the intention to use these new services. Moreover, situational influences (i.e., private vs. public, and friends vs. colleagues) are examined. The results of the two experiments show that not only does image congruence have a significant impact on consumer attitudes and the adoption decision, but there is also an interaction between image congruence and the consumption situation. Contrary to the authors’ expectations, consumers with low image congruence are influenced more by their surroundings than consumers with high image congruence. It seems that as long as the fit between the consumer’s self-image and the service image is high, signals from the consumer’s environment are overruled.

Consumer adoption of technological innovations: Effects of psychological and functional barriers in a lack of content versus a presence of content situation

Purpose – This study seeks to investigate barriers in the consumer adoption process of technological innovations under different contingencies. The paper aims to focus on barriers impeding adoption of technologies characterized by high incompatibility and high uncertainty – i.e. a “lack of content” (LoC) situation – versus technologies characterized by low incompatibility and low uncertainty – i.e. a “presence of content” (PoC) situation.Design/methodology/approach – Based on a literature study, the paper develops hypotheses that distinguish the diverging effects of both psychological and functional barriers on consumer adoption in different situations (LoC versus PoC). Data were collected by means of a survey, resulting in an effective sample of 229 respondents.Findings – In the case of LoC, the value, risk (financial and performance) and image barrier are negatively related to adoption intention, where the latter barrier is significantly stronger for the LoC situation than for the PoC situation. For PoC...

Consumer Value of Context Aware and Location Based Mobile Services

Context aware services have the ability to utilize information about the user’s context to adapt services to the user’s current situation and needs. In this paper we consider users’ perceptions of the added value of location awareness and presence information in mobile services. We use an experimental design, where stimuli comprising specific bundles of mobile services were presented to groups of respondents. The stimuli showed increasing, manipulated, levels of contextawareness, including location of the user and location and availability of buddies as distinct levels. Our results indicate that simply adding context aware features to mobile services does not necessarily provide added value to users, rather the contrary. The potential added value of insight in buddies’ location and availability is offset by people’s reluctance to share location information with others. Although the average perceived value overall is rather low there exists a substantial minority that does appreciate the added context aware features. High scores on constructs like product involvement, social influence and self-expressiveness characterize this group. The results also show that context aware service bundles with utilitarian elements have a higher perceived value than bundles with hedonic elements. On the basis of the different results some guidelines for designing context aware mobile services are formulated.

Mandatory use of technology-based self-service: does expertise help or hurt?

Purpose – This study aims to investigate the effects of two types of expertise (self-service technology and service type) on the disconfirmation of customers’ expectations and the use-related outcomes of technology-based self-service (TBSS). Design/methodology/approach – This empirical study pertains to the mandatory use of a national public transport chip card in The Netherlands based on a sample of 267 users of this TBSS. Findings – The findings show that technology experts experienced a less positive disconfirmation of expectations and reported less positive evaluations of the new self-service than technology novices. Technology experts also showed lower intentions to engage in positive word-of-mouth than technology novices. The evaluation of the self-service by technology novices is more positive for those that are service experts as compared to service novices, while the evaluation by technology experts is more negative for those that are service experts as compared to service novices. Research limit...