The Research On The Effect Of Self-Service Technology Usage Behavior On Customer Relationship

The common sense for scholars in relationship marketing and service field is that the core thing to satisfied customer and keep relationship with them is the interaction and intimate contact with customers. However, with the spreading of self-service technology, more and more firms come to apply this new technology to serve their customers. That means the customer have to service themselves without the help from staff in firm. This changes the relationship between service providers and their customers primarily. It comes to be a very important thing to explore the effect of self-service technology on relationship. But the opinions from scholars are quiet different from each other, they state that the self-service technology affect relationship in both positive and negative way due to the absent of interpersonal nature. Based on this academic and practice background, this focal research, take online bank as the setting, will explore the effect usage of online bank on relationship maintain based on the theoretical results in relationship fields. This paper will expand the research both in relationship marketing field and MIS field theoretically by manipulating relationship maintain and taking usage behavior as antecedents of relationship maintain. Practically, it’s much useful for firm to apply real customer behavior to management different customers based on the data base.This research will test all the hypotheses by empirical study which is the most useful methodology. Firstly, the author demonstrates the possibility to take usage behavior as antecedents of relationship maintain based on the existing research. Secondly, combining customer interview and academic research statement, this paper manipulates relationship maintain as relationship stability and relationship growth, and develops the measurement for both. Thirdly, this paper puts two mechanisms for the effect of usage frequency and usage variety on relationship maintain by four moderators.The empirical setting is online bank. This research tests the hypotheses and model by the data from the real online bank usage behavior and survey. The results show that:1. usage behavior can be manipulated by usage frequency and usage variety; relationship stability can be used as continuous use intention and switch intention, and relationship growth can be took as intention for increasing deposit and price premium. All these variables have good reliability and validity.2. Usage frequency has effect on four variables which stands for relationship maintain via two moderators, perceived usefulness and perceived self-efficiency, of dedication-based mechanism. The results show that usage frequency affects relationship in positive and negative way, and in detail, the negative effects is much power than positive one.3. Usage variety has effect on four variables which stands for relationship maintain by constraint-based variable, dependence, in great positive way. In all, the data fits the tested model in acceptable good-fit-index. Most of the hypotheses in this paper are proved.