Self-service banking technology (SSBT) allow customers to perform services on their own without direct assistance from staff. This study focuses on factors affecting the value of adopting self-Service banking technology (SSBT) among customers. It is believed that the successful usage of self-service banking technology will be increasingly advantageous for all (banks & customers). This chapter's purpose is an extension to the technology acceptance model (TAM) and views customer responses to technology as an integrated part of SSBT. The sample used for this study was selected from users of banks in both Libya and Australia, with a total size of 141 respondents. Reliability and validity of the data collection instrument was tested using Cronbach Alpha. Descriptive and regression tests for data analysis were used. The domains in which subjects were tested were “ease of use of SSBT”, “Usefulness of SSBT”, “Quality of SSBT”, “privacy of information” and “Trust of SSBT”.
TopIntroduction
Most banks throughout the world are moving closer to their customers and expending more effort in finding new ways to create value for themselves and transform their customer relationships. Customer support and service comprises the way that a product is delivered, explained, billed, installed, repaired, renewed – and redesigned (Galliers & Leidner, 2003).
SSBT is an essential element for increasing customer relationships because it can be used to improve customer service strategies in several ways. Individual services can be enhanced, with services and products transformed to meet new customer demands and SSBT tools being used to increase interaction with customers (Wells, Fuerst, & Choobineh, 1999). Interactions with SSBT will reflect directly on customers’ decisions about banks. A study by Kardaras and Papathanassiou (2000) suggested that the Internet can provide businesses with a cheaper way to perform activities and to access customers’ views and positions about products and services.
A study by Costello and Tuchen (1998) identified that information & communication technologies (ICTs) were used to facilitate communications in the Australian insurance sector as early as 1998; these ICTs included SSBT (self-service banking technologies) such as email, electronic mediums and the Internet. These tools have created the potential for change in banks’ delivery of products for clients, and as a result SSTs creates market-wide accessibility to service face-to-face customers. A number of the tools used in SSBT (such as mobile phones, e-mail, Internet, audio and video conferencing) will together likely change the future of Libyan financial firms and clients. SSBT seeks to move processes towards individual customers (Leek, Turnbull, & Naude, 2003), and facilitate the provision of better products and services at lower prices. Thus, SSBT are significant at reducing costs and increasing flexibility.
Self- service has become an active strategic imperative to generate successful long-term customer relationships and effectively support customers. Indeed, customer support and service are becoming one of the most critical core business processes. The importance of customer support and service needs are driving SSTs knowledge and significances more than ever before, and facilitating much faster responses to resolving customer enquiries, so it refers to “Smarter and faster ways of creating, capturing, sharing, and accessing knowledge about complex products and services”. (Blut, Wang, & Schoefer, 2016; Zeng, 2016).
Self-service systems are useful for banks to modularize and automate the repetitive fundamentals of services, focusing their resources and personnel on more personalised aspects of the bank-customer relationship, and thus providing more added-value to their consumers. On the other hand, SSBT systems give customers the feeling that they have a better control of the service choice and delivery. This is especially true for time-consuming services that require adaptive research of information and the selection of a best alternative among several available offers and solutions (Gurau, 2011).
The business press praises self-service channels for their great potential to increase bank productivity while reducing the costs of service delivery at the same time. The costs for a banking transaction, for instance, can be reduced from 1.15 U.S. dollars to only 2 cents by switching from an o-site to an online transaction (Scherer, Wünderlic, & Wangenheim, 2015).
A study by Mouelhi (2009) has determined that up to 56% of businesses in the banking sector commonly use Internet-based SSTs for online transactions. A study by Leek et al. (2003) noted that only 38% of banks used the Internet for purchase processes and only 10% of banks used the Internet for customer support services. It can be clearly seen that SSBT tools have the potential to provide beneficial applications for both customers and the Libyan banking sector in the near future.