Customers'' Expanded Use and Recommendation Behavior of Mobile Data Services
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Chen, Wen-Kuo
Abstract
Attracting new customers in competitive markets is getting difficult so continually earning profit from current customers and maintaining lasting business relationship are more important for mobile data service providers. Thus, service providers are interested in the factors that make subscribers expand using the services and how they recommend services to other potential users based on their experiences. The purpose of this dissertation is to develop a stronger understanding on what makes subscribers expand using mobile data services and how they are willing to share experiences with others. The first article considers that a customer is not only a service user, but also the partner of a firm. Therefore, this article investigates how the users recommend mobile phone services to other potential customers based on their experiences. This article focuses on two determinants of customer recommendation behavior, namely, overall satisfaction and flow experience. It also proposes a number of hypotheses related to the constructs of overall satisfaction, and test them using data provided by 3G mobile service subscribers. The data used in this research was collected from online questionnaires done by 480 respondents. The results contribute to understand of how customers are willing to make recommendations to others. Besides increasing customer satisfaction, this article should consider a mediating factor—users’ flow experiences. Our findings provide empirical support for most of the hypotheses. The theoretical and practical implications of our findings are also discussed, and suggestions for further research are offered. The second article proposes a framework incorporating the flow theory and the theory of planned behavior to understand the expanded use of mobile videophones. The research model was tested with the PLS-Graph software based on its structural equation modeling approach. The data used in this research was collected from online questionnaires done by 151 respondents. The findings show that flow and subjective norm are positively related to the expanded intention to use mobile videophones and privacy concern is negatively related to that intention. It is also found that the effects of media characteristics such as interactivity and telepresence may have significant influences on the flow. In addition, this research examines that the effects of flow, subjective norm, and privacy concern on expanded intention to use mobile videophones is moderated by the personality trait of self-monitoring. It reveals that regardless of different personalities, people will like to expand the intention to use mobile videophones when they immerse in the flow.
Subjects
customer recommendation behavior
expanded use
the flow theory
the theory of planned behavior
mobile data services
mobile videophones
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