Viewpoint: Understanding the Internet banking adoption: A unified theory of acceptance and use of technology and perceived risk application

Purpose – Customer engagement is a concept that has emerged recently to capture customers' total set of behavioral activities toward a firm. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of customer engagement behaviors on perceived relationship benefits and relationship outcomes.Design/methodology/approach – An online survey of members of a gaming Facebook brand community, resulting in 276 usable responses from gaming customers.Findings – Customer engagement was divided into “Community Engagement Behaviors” (CEB) and “Transactional Engagement Behaviors” (TEB). In addition, three relationship benefits were identified: social benefits, entertainment benefits and economic benefits. The engagement behaviors largely influenced the benefits received. Furthermore, the mediation analysis results show that the influence of CEB on satisfaction is partially mediated by social benefits and entertainment benefits, while the effect of TEB on satisfaction is fully mediated through the same benefits. The effect of CE...

Customer engagement in a Facebook brand community

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to examine the use of the strategic management tool, Strengths‐Weaknesses‐Opportunities‐Threats or SWOT analysis, and to assess how the methodology has been used as well as changes to the methodology. The findings both for and against SWOT analysis should lead to a balanced view of the technique as well as yield ideas for needed theory building.Design/methodology/approach – Using the ABInform Global® database, academic peer‐reviewed articles were compiled indicating SWOT as one of the article's key index and search words.Findings – The use of SWOT analysis continues to permeate the academic peer‐reviewed literature. Research supports SWOT analysis as a tool for planning purposes. Over the past decade, SWOT research has focused on analyzing organizations for recommended strategic actions. As a methodology for strategic positioning, SWOT analysis has been extended beyond companies to countries and industries and is used in virtually every published business case positi...

Exploring SWOT analysis – where are we now?

Customer loyalty is an important strategic objective for all managers. Research has investigated the relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty in various contexts. However, these predominantly cross-sectional studies have focused on customer retention as the primary measure of loyalty. There has been little investigation into the impact on share of wallet. Using data from the Canadian banking industry, this research aims to (1) provide the first longitudinal examination of the impact of changes in customer satisfaction on changes in share of wallet and (2) determine the moderating effects of customer age, income, education, expertise, and length of relationship. Data from 4319 households using 12,249 observations over a five-year period indicate a positive relationship between changes in satisfaction and share of wallet. In particular, the initial satisfaction level and the conditional percentile of change in satisfaction significantly correspond to changes in share of wallet. Two va...

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A Longitudinal Analysis of Customer Satisfaction and Share of Wallet: Investigating the Moderating Effect of Customer Characteristics

For the last twenty-five years customer experiences have been considered to be a key concept in marketing management, consumer behaviour, services marketing and retailing with the result that the underlying logic and managerial rationale for experience marketing is well established in the marketing literature. However, the gulf between academics and practitioners on this topic is now as wide as ever with bestselling titles on experience marketing written by and for practitioners, which are rich in examples and step-by-step guides to managerial success yet pay scant attention to the contributions of academics in this area. The purpose of this paper is to review and reassess the extant work on experience marketing. Service-Dominant logic is employed to bridge the divide between theory and practice in this respect. A model of customer's experience proposed, implications for practitioners and academics are discussed and greater dialogue is called for between marketers and their academic counterparts.

Experience marketing: a review and reassessment

When it comes to identity fraud and its narrower cousin, identity theft, the Federal Trade Commission is on red alert and banks are rethinking the issue of combating thieves who lift legitimate account holder's credentials to line their own pockets You could say the tipping point occurred with headlines from February's ChoicePoint data breach and the Alpharetta, Ga-based firm's required disclosure under California law Or, that the issue was greenlighted to greater importance soon after with an insider infiltration of a database at a newly acquired subsidiary of New York City headquartered LexisNexis, itself active in the ID theft prevention market (Although no known cases of identity theft have, as of yet, resulted from these events, there is a high correlation between breaches and subsequent spikes in consumer accounts fraud) Clearly, there has been a spike in consumer awareness and anxiety It has helped to generate renewed industry interest in a chronic problem In terms of what the hard evidence illustrates, reported complaints of ID theft have shot up to 93 million from 500,000 in 2001, according to the FTC and other sources Before recent events and headlines, leading banks were already struggling to work more effectively with law enforcement and considering which channels to monitor (ABABJ, January 2001, p27) Certain ATMs, as an example, can be altered to take in account and password information and new account fraud tends to occur in the branch Moreover, the most progressive banks have taken steps to address problems particular to their organizations But ID theft continues to confound more than a few financial services firms with its shifty form Some variants include new account opening with a false identity and account takeover--or use of stolen information to say, pay the bills of the thief, who is perhaps more desperate than professional in that instance To this day, the topic inspires mixed industry commentary, particularly "on background," where an astute listener will notice that all the experts have a distinct opinion about (1) whether the problem really is significant enough to take "drastic action" against it; (2) what root causes of ID theft are the "best ones" to address; and 3 whether the problem will spike further or gradually level off and become a non-issue on its own over time If short-run patterns are any indication, ID fraud will only continue--gushing before it settles into a trickle Yet all sources seem to agree on this point on and off the record: as part of an operational risk management plan, banks need to have some strategy in place because of the potential impact of ID theft on their brand and because it can erode consumer confidence in the banking industry Synergistic effect Today some of the terms of debate have shifted, but talk, and, finally, action, has intensified in an effort to head criminals off at the pass Consider phishing attacks, which have reared their collective ugly head over the last two years These have also promoted interest in addressing ID theft and fraud, as the technique represents yet another way to harvest account information In this variation, phishers trick unwitting internet users into giving up account information by presenting legitimate looking e-mails that link to phony web pages, which harvest data Some technologists believe that--as phishing "automated" the information gathering that can lead to other types of fraud--capabilities such as scripts, Trojans, "bots," and spyware will be increasingly used to set other aspects of fraud spinning out in a no-holds-barred auto-attack "It's conceivable that fraud will have a mechanized aspect in the future," says Eli Katz, practice director in the global financial services practices, Unisys, Blue Bell, Pa "If that happens, phishing will only be part of a broader, automated theft industry," he explains, adding, "Certainly today, there is more to the story of ID theft than phishing …

Will You Spend to Thwart ID Theft? Internet Based or Not, Ill-Protected Records Are Yielding Criminals a License to Steal. Vendors and Bankers Want to Fight Back

High tech training tools promise to rectify deficits Skills expertise has always been a hallmark of banking--on the teller line, in the loan department, or in the boardroom. Today, however, new opportunities and a rising tide of information leave us with more to master. At a time when bankers need a hot new strategic initiative every other quarter, many organizations are chronically behind the eight ball in skills assessment and training of their teams. In the face of a skills gap, companies offering computer-based training tools are in the trenches supplying skills-hungry bankers with CD-ROMs, software, or skills enhancement on the Web. These tools vary in approach and specialization, but share the characteristic of 1. identifying specific deficits in skills; and 2. tracking improvement via some quantitative measure. Done with nifty graphics and cut-to-the-chase tutorials, this generation of training programs finally seems to be good enough--and relevant enough to the real world--to serve in lieu of traditional teaching methods, especially if these programs enable organizations that would otherwise postpone training to get started. Besides, an inherent strength of computer-based training is its ability to let students take what they need and learn as they go, in accordance with their talents and time constraints. On the following pages are brief overviews of some of the newer training products. The writeups are in alphabetical order by company name. We have not tested these systems, so some investigation and negotiation would be prudent before you commit to a particular company or software product. In addition to what is described herein, the ABA offers a full range of training programs, including computer-based training, from its Corporation for American Banking-endorsed companies and other partners. In addition ABA offers a wide range of courses from its American Institute of Banking unit. These courses cover such subjects as building customer relationships, introduction to financial planning, and trends and alternative delivery systems. The range of systems can be seen in the training section of ABA's Web site, whose address is www.aba.com. Another source for training information is the publication Inside Technology Training, whose Web address is www.ittrain.com. Additionally, information on subjects like enterprise resource management (see article on beginning on page 62) are available from The Standish Group, Dennis, Mass., and Yankee Group, Boston. Also consider that with Web-based training, you should question vendors about whether there are any particular browser and/or bandwidth requirements that might impede program performance. Lockbax training Known for its Proof Performer product, Abby, Inc. now offers RemittPro, a lockbox training software program particularly useful for institutions with a heavy volume of wholesale or retail remittance transactions and high turnover. This Windowsbased, audio-enhanced program can be customized for imaging or manual remittance training, and covers subjects such as extraction and check negotiability. In designing the program over a two-year period, Abby collaborated with First American National Bank in Nashville, Tenn., receiving input from lockbox managers and employees to incorporate their training preferences. RemittPro includes an online manual (accessible through the help function) and a glossary of more than 200 remittance processing terms. For users of calculators and adding machines, Abby also plans, in the next 60 days, to roll out a standalone, interactive training program to enhance the "10key proficiency." Good leaders can be trained Computer training seems mainly targeted to the rank and file, but Achieveglobal, a Times Mirror company, Tampa, Ela., has come to the aid of executives who may want to evaluate or enhance management skills. …

Closing the Skills Gap

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Customer engagement is one of those seemingly squishy marketing concepts grown out of the social internet phenomena and Web 2.0, which has surprising precision and heft once you spend some time with it. In webland, the client who is engaged interacts with your site often and buys what you have to sell there; he or she may be opinionated and free to offer personal views, blog on the industry you serve, or otherwise spend quality personal time thinking about your company. In this sense, engagement is measured by metrics like click-through rate, duration of visit, and percentage of repeat visits. In broader terms, the engaged customer is a pleased customer. (Although definitions differ on this, the engaged customer, according to Gallup, has an emotional attachment to the brand and generally incorporates it into his or her self concept.) He or she becomes a regular--and possibly an advocate. Net promoter score examined A loud and proud metric in this broader field of engagement analysis is the Net Promoter Score, which was developed by Fred Reichheld, founder of Bain's Loyalty Practice and the NPS Loyalty Forum, a community of practitioners. Reichheld, who spoke at the recent Forrester Financial Services Forum in New York, offered a simple explanation of the score. "What we found was that the Golden Rule applied to business," he said. "'Treat people the way you want to be treated' is not only an ethical way to operate, it can yield a payoff." Customers who perceive that value in the product was enhanced by fair treatment and good service buy more. When a bank combines NPS information on loyalty with information on customer profitability and other segment data, according to Reichheld, the bank can glean insight about what's working and what isn't, supporting necessary strategic shifts. The score also lets a bank leverage its customer service and retail delivery spend to boost profits. Important to banks Having engaged and loyal customers is important to banks, which face a tough economy and, according to Forrester Research, have received the lowest Customer Advocacy Rankings in the five years that the firm began looking at it. "The subprime mortgage crisis and a sagging stock market has consumers feeling less confident about their financial position," says Bill Doyle, vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. Banks that continue with status quo operations and a product focus will remain on shaky ground. But, as bankers realize, even when the grass was greener and accounts had more green, many consumers were said to view retail banks as typically interchangeable and serving up of commodity fare. Leaders in the field--Wells Fargo and Wachovia come to mind--have gradually reworked operations to better enable awareness of the customer's perspective, in part, admittedly to make their cross-sales campaigns work. Yet, both have pushed to improve service issues via better channel integration, and generally, more consistent customer experiences across the channels. In short, these and other leaders have tried to "be all they can be" for consumers, but loyalty isn't easy to come by. And perhaps this is why there is more attention being paid to measuring non-financial feedback from customers: those who manage to get it right--the process and the loyalty--will have something. "Measuring factors like loyalty, customer engagement, and customer satisfaction is becoming a popular idea," says John McHugh, a New York-based managing partner, Financial Services CRM practice with Accenture. "You're beginning to see more dashboards being developed to, in effect, link customer service insights to other measures," he says. Banks, he explains have long known that happy customers are important to success, but only now is the industry in the first wave of formalizing how this intuitive truth translates into harder measures of success. …

Guided by Feedback: Measuring Customer Engagement

If you think the first rule of e-business is to make money, you probably won't fare well in the virtual realm. That's the consensus, anyway, of a recent crop of books and seminars on e-commerce and business models that succeed there. Think of the customer first, and you're half way to being the goose that lays golden eggs. Want to keep those eggs coming? Then understand that we're past the blue-sky phase of the Internet's business cycle, and in a steadier chapter where smart, soberly conceived models can shine, says Matthias Hartmann, managing principal and practice leader, IBM financial services, Frankfurt, Germany. Hartmann is responsible for providing systems related to e-banking, IT-strategy, and clearing and settlement. At a recent technology conference hosted by Trema Group, in Cannes, France, he spoke about emerging business models in the digital economy. Among other points, Hartmann noted that banks will have to partner with specialized service providers to triumph in their internet ventures. Hartmann also offered examples of early Internet winners. Autobytel, he says, is a full-service model (one that offers market-making functions as well as information for comparison shopping) that aligns itself around the "life event" of a customer--in this case, the purchase of a car. "Contact arrangers," third parties that link buyers to sellers and take a fee, operate under a different, yet apparantly viable, model. Each offers banks some best-practice notion that they might take to the table--or their boardrooms--but they will also need their own sharp ideas to win Internet-based earnings. Creating value for the customer Although much of Hartmann's talk involved dissecting the business models of the few, the lucky, and the branded, he also discussed (like others cited in this article) the customer, who firmly occupies center stage in the digital economy. Being for the customer involves more than slick sloganeering, says Hartmann and others. It refers instead to customer centricity, one cornerstone of the digital economy. "The early optimism has faded, and now we're looking for models that underscore distinct value creation," he explained. Virtual hesitations, stumbles, and adjustments ought not be confused with short-lived fads, however, because, by most accounts, e-commerce is here to stay. (In fact, it is rapidly becoming synonymous with commerce itself.) Forrester Research, for example, estimates that 400 million consumers are expected to be online by 2001, up from 100 million in 1999, while Jupiter Communications postulates that eight million households are conducting Internet banking right now. By now, when e-commerce hype is at an all time high, and tech stocks have soared, and tanked, and trended upward again, bankers have learned at least the fundamentals about the burgeoning virtual marketplace. And given bank's traditional roles in the payment system and in lending, there are some obvious places to begin shaping their e-commerce strategies. But Mary Pat McCarthy, co-author of Digital Transformation, The essentials of e-Business Leadership, McGraw Hill, says that in her role as vice chair of Information, Communications, and Entertainment at KPMG LLP, she gets numerous requests for "more clarity" in matters related to the Internet. And so, she wrote a kind of primer on developing an e-commerce strategy that discusses the need for vision and the need to embrace imprecision to win on the Net. "Management needs to understand that the Internet is typically disruptive--yet if they wait for perfection [in their business model] they'll lose." Making the suggestion that banks spin off particularly disruptive models into separate companies, McCarthy also touches on the importance of the six "c's" --commerce, content, culture, cost, collaboration, and community when planning an Internet venture. "There is a live interaction between these elements; you can't manage any one of them out of context with the rest," McCarthy explains, adding: "You can't think linearly about the Net. …

E-Business Models Stress Putting the Customer First

Forget about Napster, p2p is for everybody and is about collaboration Peer-to-peer technology first generated real ink when the music-sharing website, Napster, forced the big labels into the courtroom to defend their products. Why should banks care about something that affected record companies? Because Napster's notorious profile, and the peer-to-peer hype that ensued, tended to obscure the technology's uses as a collaborative tool for financial services companies. To the extent that peer technology means anything to bankers, many probably equate it with file sharing and "cycle stealing"--a scheme that lets one computer's idle time be co-opted for use by another. But the technology can also extend the power and reach of web applications, that is, business logic that's already been converted for use and distribution over the internet. Putting business uses aside for a moment, peer-enablement itself is created by use of common messaging formats (which we'll get into later) and common net-friendly languages, most notably XML. This allows two peers to exchange files, programs, or computational power -- depending on how the technology is deployed. At its root, this technology's greatest boon is its ability to facilitate the comparatively easy retrieval of data--at least that's how one analyst sees it. "What's great about the technology is its ability to make any digital 'information' located in a peer member easier to get to for the support transactions and other work," says Robert Hegarty, director of investment management at TowerGroup, Needham, Mass. "While a member will, of course, have to be proactive about getting peer-enabled, they won't have to be proactive about searching out data once they are set up to operate in a peer environment," Hegarty adds. In the case of the Wall Street-oriented vendor, Worldstreet, the transaction in question includes locating two peer "members" so they can transmit research. Another financial services player, Liquid-Net, lets users identify each other and signal their interest in deal making in a virtual market. The potential of peer computing seems "nearly limitless and would have a profound impact on buy-side trading and the analyst portfolio management community," says Hegarty. Having recently issued a report on the technology's impact on Wall Street, he sees numerous potential uses for fund managers and traders who live--and die--by data. Today, under client-server, this data resides in a database and can only be accessed by reaching a server. Simplified data retrieval is one of peer-to-peer's gifts, but web collaboration is another potential benefit, and one that could bring Wall Street and Main Street institutions the biggest bang for the buck. What makes it p2p? Peer technology vendors that support business process sharing tend to be categorized as "extranet" or "infrastructural" providers by analysts. Providing web services, as they are called, these vendors use their wares to re-format and facilitate joint use of computer code (and subsequent workflows) between business partners. "Peer technology as we make use of it, uses 'light,' easy-to-evoke code that makes it simpler for business partners to establish links between them over TCP/IP using common data protocols," says Daniel Seltzer, chief technology officer and co-founder of Interbind, New York City. "With this easy connection work gets done between two devices -- say a personal digital assistant and a server -- that typically have different operating systems, different applications, or different capacities." Interbind, as with some other vendors in this class, makes use of Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP), which is one basic messaging format that, in its purest form, lets devices from different operating system environments, using different languages, communicate. "A SOAP message wraps around a proprietary chunk of code and defines that code for the recipient device," Seltzer says. …

Lauren Bielski

Papers

Will You Spend to Thwart ID Theft? Internet Based or Not, Ill-Protected Records Are Yielding Criminals a License to Steal. Vendors and Bankers Want to Fight Back

Closing the Skills Gap

Guided by Feedback: Measuring Customer Engagement

E-Business Models Stress Putting the Customer First

Peer-to-Peer Technology