MEASURING CONSUMER INNOVATIVENESS TOWARDS SELF-SERVICE TECHNOLOGY IN SERVICE INDUSTRY

Abstract

Developing and implementing innovations has become a critical determinant of survival in today’s competitive scenario. Over the past two decades, advances in technological and service innovations have allowed firms to offer technology-based self-service delivery options to their consumers. To this end, self-service technologies (SSTs) have become prevalent as service delivery options in almost all kinds of services such as banking, hospitality, and retail services. The development of such SSTs is significantly altering the nature of consumer-firm interactions. To date, majority of the service delivery research has concentrated on the interpersonal interactions with very little exploration investigating technology-based options. In fact, most of the research in recent years has focused on online-service delivery options. This research is intended to develop an understanding of the consumer innovation adoption process relating to self-service delivery options in offline service contexts. In order to ensure that such SSTs reach full potential, service firms need to understand the innovation and consumer characteristics, and situational factors that are related to the propensity to adopt these SST options. This study is grounded in the literature from consumer innovativeness, information technology, and diffusion and adoption of innovations. Based on systematic study of extant literature on consumer innovativeness and TAM-based studies, followed by qualitative research, a theoretical conceptual model of consumer SST adoption was developed and proposed. The model highlights a five-stage innovation adoption process – Awareness, Investigation, Evaluation, Trial, and Adoption – along with the details of the variables to be found as determinants of SST adoption. All these crucial determinants are divided into two main categories – i) SST characteristics (perceived usefulness, perceived ease-of-use, complexity, and perceived risk); and ii) user characteristics (technology anxiety, need for interaction, subjective norm, previous experience, and demographics). Consumer innovativeness mediates the relationships between SST characteristics, user characteristics, and likelihood of adoption. Furthermore, two situational variables (wait time and crowding) were also incorporated as moderators between consumer innovativeness and likelihood of SST adoption. A mixed research design was applied with a preliminary qualitative research exploring various determinants of SST adoption, followed by a quantitative investigation of determinants included in this study. Data were collected in different stages for different purposes such as scale development iii and validation. For final analysis, data were collected via both online as well as offline survey methods from 380 service consumers who were already familiar with numerous SSTs available in distinct offline service contexts. The research instrument (questionnaire) was developed by adopting standard scales available for constructs acknowledged during literature review and qualitative research. Since there was no scale available for measuring consumer innovativeness towards SSTs, this research develops and validates a self-service innovativeness (SSI) scale applicable across a variety of SSTs. After developing this scale with a large sample, it has been validated in different contexts, allowing comparisons across distinct samples (i.e., student vs. non-student sample) and different industries (i.e., retail and hospitality industries). There are 14 hypotheses in total, exploring three different kinds of effects – i) direct effects of various determinants on adoption intention; ii) mediating effects of consumer innovativeness variable between determinants and adoption intention; and finally iii) moderating effects of situational variables between consumer innovativeness and adoption intention. The results of hypotheses testing confirm the proposed mediating effects of the consumer innovativeness variable between determinants and adoption intention. Beside this, three of the four SST characteristics variables (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived risk) were found to have a significant direct effect on SST adoption that was mediated by the consumer innovativeness variable. Similarly, six of the eight user characteristics variables (technology anxiety, need for interaction, subjective norm, previous experience, age and income) have a significant direct effect on adoption intention. Of these, consumer innovativeness mediates the relationship between four determinants (technology anxiety, need for interaction, previous experience, and age) and SST adoption. In addition, preliminary support is found for the proposed five-stage innovation adoption process. The research findings contribute to the understanding of consumer innovativeness towards SSTs for both practitioners and academicians. The theoretical conceptual model outlines various determinants of SST adoption, crucial stages of innovation adoption process, and more interestingly the mediating role of consumer innovativeness between these determinants and SST adoption intention. Additionally, the SSI scale developed, validated and proposed in this study is short, valid, reliable, and easy to administer across SSTs in different service domains. This study is intended to direct further academic research on SST adoption, and provides guidance to firms struggling with the development and implementation of SSTs