Personalization and Customer Satisfaction in Mobile Commerce

Abstract

he advancement of wireless technology facilitates both consumers’ activities and business transactions. With the rapid proliferation and widespread use of mobile devices, including mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and handheld computers, mobile commerce or m-commerce is widely considered to be a driving force for the next generation of electronic commerce (e-commerce). According to Jupiter Research, the m-commerce industry is expected to be US$22 billion globally by 2005. However, to date many promising technologies—especially m-commerce applications—have failed with the notable exceptions of i-Mode service and short messaging service (SMS). Popular “i-Mode”, produced by NTT DoCoMo of Japan, is a service that enables wireless Web browsing and e-mail from mobile phones. The “i-Mode service” has been the first successful commercial introduction of 3G (third-generation) mobile applications. It exceeded expectations and acquired over 30 million profitable users in a three-year period (Cohen, 2002). One of the main goals of most operators might be building customer satisfaction and loyalty by providing one or more ‘killer apps’ to them. One way is to integrate customer relationship management (CRM) into the development of mobile services’ applications. Some firms have tried to target these applications to their customers on an individualized basis. “Personalization” may be the way to achieve that. Specifically, personalization can be regarded as the use of technology and user/customer information to match multimedia content with individual needs with the goal of producing user satisfaction. Personalization can be presented by an IP services framework that allows operators and subscribers through self-service provisioning approaches to control the types of service and applications they want and are willing to buy. The purpose of this article is to develop a deeper understanding of personalization, with an emphasis on those factors that lead to customer satisfaction and/or delight. Specifically, this article presents factors contributing to consequences derived from using personalized applications and services in m-commerce.