Research On The Impact Of New Service Development Competence In Supply Chain Finance E-platform Services On Customer Satisfaction

Recently,more and more supply chain financing customers are accessing the supply chain financing services available on the electronic commerce platform(e-platform)in Mainland China and Hong Kong.These SCF e-platform services,which are designed to optimize the flows and allocation of financial resources in a supply chain through the IT enabled e-platform,create intense competition for SCF e-platform banks.This necessitates the development of high-quality new SCF e-platform services to adapt to diverse SCF e-platform customer needs.Building the competence that is crucial to the development of new SCF eplatform services becomes a top managerial priority for SCF e-platform banks.While many SCF e-platform banks attempt to secure their new service development(NSD)competence in SCF e-platform for better competitive advantages,they frequently encounter obstacles to meet or exceed customer satisfaction,subsequently affecting the loyalty of their SCF e-platform customers.Practical difficulties of transforming the banks' NSD competence values into perceived benefits and customer satisfaction for SCF e-platform service remain unsolved and underrepresented in current SCF literature.The specific objectives of thesis are to examine: the identification of various dimensions of the bank's NSD competence in SCF e-platform services,and the influence mechanism of bank's NSD competence in SCF e-platform services to satisfaction of SCF e-platform customers,including core firms and SCF e-platform financing clients.Since the SCF eplatform involves the socio-technical participation of SCF e-platform banks,SCF e-platform financing clients and core firms,it raises two relevant important questions to discover the influence mechanism:(i)how does the bank's NSD competence in SCF e-platform influence the SCF e-platform customers' relationship commitment and information integration?;(ii)How do the SCF e-platform customers' relationship commitment and information integration influence their perceived benefits and satisfaction for SCF e-platform services?In regards to addressing the issue of identifying NSD competence in SCF e-platform services,this thesis deploys grounded theory approach to gather qualitative data from 39 SCF bank managers and 10 SCF e-platform customers to identify 4 major types of NSD competences,which are further developed in Q-sort survey analysis and empirically validated in the analysis of survey studies involving dyads of 2 SCF banks,221 core firms and 221 SCF e-platform financing clients for 221 distinct SCF e-platform projects.In regards to addressing the issue of discovering the mechanism for transforming bank's NSD competence to SCF eplatform customer satisfaction,this thesis deploys an integrated approach that combines grounded theory approach,Q-sort method and dyadic survey method to examine the relationships among variables.The findings from the grounded study and survey studies indicate that the bank's NSD competence in SCF e-platform services is composed of 4 distinct dimensions,including SCF e-platform customer knowledge competence,SCF e-platform technology competence,SCF eplatform collaborative competence and SCF e-platform risk control competence.On how the NSD competence in SCF e-platform services influences relationship commitment and information integration,this thesis finds the variations in opinions between core firms and SCF e-platform financing clients in grounded study and dyadic survey studies.From the perspectives of SCF banks and core firms,bank's SCF e-platform technology competence and SCF e-platform collaborative competence positively influence the core firms' relationship commitment and information integration.The importance of these two NSD competences lies in the rationale behind the core firms' aspirations.For these core firms,who have invested significantly to integrate all their business processes and information,usually place high emphasis on the technical capabilities and collaboration capabilities of the bank when deciding on relationship commitment and information integration.From the perspectives of SCF banks and SCF e-platform financing clients,bank's SCF e-platform customer knowledge competence and SCF e-platform risk control competence positively influence the SCF e-platform financing clients' relationship commitment and information integration.The importance of these two NSD competences lies in the rationale behind the SCF e-platform financing clients' aspirations.For these clients,they are better and cost effectively served by the bank when the bank is more capable of developing the SCF eplatform customer knowledge competence and SCF e-platform risk control competence to identify the client's financial needs and control credit risks through historical transaction information.The findings from the grounded study and survey studies also indicate that the customers' relationship commitment and information integration positively influence their perceived benefits,which in turn positively affect their satisfaction for the SCF e-platform services.The significance of this thesis is threefold.First,this thesis pioneers the identification of four NSD competence dimensions in SCF e-platform context,after taking into account that the SCF service structure and the three party agreements are unique in SCF e-platform business.This highly differentiates from previous works by integrating various stakeholders' perspectives(i.e.multiple informants within a bank and a SCF e-platform customer)and being able to articulate how a more practical use of NSD competence dimensions can motivate the different types of SCF e-platform customers to embrace relationship commitment and information integration.Second,this thesis first puts forward the measures for perceived benefits for core firms and SCF e-platform financing clients respectively,subsequently extending the research on perceived benefits for diverse groups of SCF e-platform customers,after taking into account of parsimonious inclusion of relationship-oriented benefits.Third,this thesis pioneers the evaluation of mediating effects of relationship commitment and information integration on SCF e-platform customer satisfaction.By identifying and evaluating the mediating effects of relationship commitment and information integration on SCF e-platform customer satisfaction,the thesis pioneers in extending the socio-technical and configuration theory to SCF service innovation domain.