My work with the marketing department of Shell Oil Cambodia allowed me to observe first-hand the challenges and opportunities of customer retention and how excellence service keeps customers coming back. In today’s Internet economy, companies use e-services extensively in addition to traditional services like those I were a part of at Shell. My experience and observations at that time directed my research interests into two areas: e-service customer retention and the marketing of e-experience. In particular, my research in e-service customer retention focuses on the behavioral aspects. Expanding on my dissertation regarding the role of emotion in technology acceptance, I tackled the issue of customer retention behavior from both the emotional and cognitive perspectives. This research question was pursued in two empirical studies.
- Published in the Journal of Information Science and Technology, the first study examined the roles of switching costs and the negative affectivity trait in customers’ intention to continue to use an e-service.
- The second study examined three post-adoption behaviors of e-service customers from both the cognitive and affective stand-points. The three post-adoption behaviors are: intention to continue, intention to complaint, and intention to recommend an e-service. This study was presented at the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science 2007 in January. It was invited and submitted for review to the International Journal of Electronic Commerce, the top journal in e-commerce.
Work-in-progress Research Projects:
1. The Roles of Core Affective Experience and Negative Affectivity in Technology Acceptance
My dissertation research explores the role of core affective experience and negative affectivity in technology acceptance. I attempt to enrich UTAUT with these two emotional variables. I use a structural-equation modeling technique called Partial Least Square to analyze the data. It is theory-driven research with two studies and multiple data-collection points. The findings reveal that the two affective constructs have a place in the model beyond the variation by chance alone. I am currently working on this manuscript and will submit to an A-level journal soon.
2. e-Service Customer Retention: Affective-Events Theory and Attribution Theory Perspectives
Learning more about the psychology of e-consumers may provide answers for why some websites succeed and others fail. Studies of online customer behaviors focused on systems and information quality as determinants of system success (e.g. Delone and McLean, 1992). Another stream of research focused on the effects of interruption and online waiting on consumer behavior (e.g. Nah, 2004; Ryan and Valverde, 2006). The current study attempts to bridge the two streams of research and explain e-service user behavior in a unified model. It attempts to explain customer retention behaviors using affective-events theory and attribution theory whereas previous research examined this phenomenon guided by the expectancy-confirmation theory. With the affective-events theory it was proposed that e-service customer behaviors are determined by information quality, system quality, and the frequency and extensiveness of interruptive incidents. From the attribution theory stand-point it is further argued that the attributions of those online interruptive events (to different causes) moderate the effects of those incidents on the attitude of the customer towards the e-service provider.
This research is currently in the proposal stage, and is targeted for publication in MIS Quarterly, due to its being theory-driven as well as the novelty of the idea.
3. Post-adoption Behaviors of E-service Customers: The Roles of Evaluation, Emotion, and Cognition
In today’s experience economy, e-service providers need to connect with customers emotionally to satisfy and retain them. Loyal customers not only continue to use the service but also help to recruit more customers through positive word-of-mouth, while unhappy customers discontinue service usage and discourage others. Therefore, understanding the emotional determinants of post-adoption behavior is an important issue.
In this study, we proposed that customers’ post-consumption hedonic and utilitarian evaluations are the determinants of emotional and cognitive reactions, and that post-consumption evaluation, emotional and cognitive reactions in turn influence three behaviors: complaint, recommendation, and continuance intentions.
This paper is under review at the 2007 International Conference on Information Systems.
4. Revitalizing the P's in e-Marketing with Customer Experience Management
There has been increasing use of Internet technologies as marketing tools to manage customers’ online experience. Using those tools in an integrated manner however, presents a challenge for marketers. Traditionally, marketers embrace the framework of marketing mix, consisting of Product, Price, Place, and Promotion to guide them in planning marketing strategy. The framework was formulated from the mass-marketing era to guide marketers in allocating marketing resources. Two major flaws of the old marketing framework are identified: it is product-oriented, and it does not address the interactive aspects of online commerce. Thus, it fails to account for rapidly changing media that lead to changing expectations and consumption behaviors on the part of the consumer.
Today’s market of “instant gratification” customers follows three important principles of marketing: the personalized transaction principle, the retention principle, and the trust principle. These three principles are the pillars of today’s Internet marketing. Based on these three principles we propose the new four P’s of electronic customer experience management (e-CEM) framework (see figure below). We contend that in order to deliver an unforgettable experience to new generations of customers, e-marketers should communicate with them in the combination of push-pull-participative ways and to get to know each customer on a one-to-one basis. The offers can be personalized to fit the needs and goals of each customer and at the same time make the customers feel that they are promptly served and in control of their privacy. Each element is not distinctively separated from another, but rather they are interdependent. For example, promptness and privacy are musts, and while push-pull-participative communication provides information for personalization, privacy and personalization must be considered together.
We also contend that an online experience management framework can be applied at four levels. They are: strategy, metrics/control, practices, and technological tools. Due to the practical orientation of this paper, it is targeted for publication in Communication of the ACM.
5. e-Experience: New Research Agenda for IS
The progression of economic value in our society is at the point where the “staging experience” for customers is the key to winning the next competitive battleground (Pine and Gilmore, 1998). Some call the present economy the “experience economy.” Forrester’s research suggests that Experience-Based Differentiation is the source of competitive advantage in the new economy. Whereas products and services were the main focus of exchange in the industrial era, experience is the focus of exchange in today’s economy. Companies have traditionally sought to offer products & services that are simple and that stand alone. Today’s customer expects a richer experience from a complex mix of products and services that are usually provided by a value network of companies. The configuration of those services and products online are the basis of e-experience, which is a new kind of online value proposition in today’s network world.
We have identified four constraints to the configuration of e-experience: mobility issues, coordination complexity, personalized experience, and the trial ability of e-experience. Those constraints can be overcome with current technologies such as: web service, virtual reality, recommendation engines and mobile computing. We also proposed a way to identify opportunities for e-experience and how to configure them based on value networks concepts. This represents a promising research stream that can revive the IS field because it has both an academic appeal and practical implications. E-experience is where much of the future of the U. S. economy will reside. Many products and services are now made/offered outside the United States (e.g. the case of Chindia = China India). The only way for the U.S. to stay competitive on the world stage is to put research resources that relate to the innovation of e-experience, from academia and industry, to immediate use. For the IS academic, there is a lot to be gained from this new trend of e-experience. First of all, we propose a new Special Interest Group on e-Experience to be formed within the Association for Information Systems (AIS). A track on e-experience for all AIS-sponsored conferences should also be created to provide a channel for communication and discussion as well as encourage increased research on e-experiences within our community.
6. Other Research Interests
Another research interest is that of value networks. In the paper that I presented at AMCIS 2004, I proposed a “Multi-process Actor, Strategic Analysis Model for Flexible E-business Propositions based on a Value Networks Configuration.” Another paper that I presented in the 4th IFIP working group 7.6 workshop was about the “Power Structure of E-tourism” from the e-value network perspectives. Another work in this stream is the paper that I presented to the 2006 San Diego International Systems Conference about the supply-chain structure of the online air-travel industry. A different paper entitled “Users as social actors: the case of the ‘Internet Village Motoman’ project in rural Cambodia” (presented at the Organizations and Society in Information Systems, a pre-ICIS 2005 workshop) employs the qualitative case-study method of data collection and analysis and awaits my attention in the near future.