Post-adoption modeling of advanced mobile service use

Abstract

This study proposes a post-adoption model of advanced mobile services (AMS) emphasizing relationships between actual use and its antecedents: service ubiquity and experiential value. The study examines intrinsic and extrinsic motivational beliefs as mediators between service ubiquity and experiential value. The authors test the model on the basis of self-reported data from 603 AMS users in Australia. The results demonstrate that ease of use, enjoyment, and time convenience are full mediators between service ubiquity and experiential value. Further, experiential value drives the actual AMS use. However, customer satisfaction mediates this relationship. Business and leisure customers are found to be significantly different in their AMS use. More specifically, service ubiquity's influence on experiential value is significantly higher for leisure than business AMS users. Furthermore, experiential value's effect on customer satisfaction is significantly higher for business than for leisure customers.

Introduction

“The sky is the limit” appears to describe the current context for service delivery. Technological advances allow electronic delivery of many traditional services through various media, including self-service kiosks (e.g., ATM machines) and the internet (e.g., airline ticket purchase). Such technology-mediated services transpire with limited service provider intervention creating effective and efficient service delivery—often better than traditional service delivery involving physical contact with the service provider. Mobile telecommunication's rapid changes allow many companies to extend service delivery to mobile channels, offering services which customers can access through their mobile devices (Dholakia & Dholakia, 2004). Continuously accessible, such services potentially will permeate and support daily activities, especially in today's time-deprived environment.

This study focuses on ubiquitous mobile services, known as advanced mobile services (AMS), widely available in the marketplace. AMS are any services beyond voice calls and short messaging services, accessible from mobile devices, enabling customers to communicate with other parties, seek pleasure, perform transactions, and obtain information (Varshney & Vetter, 2002). These services include mobile e-mail, mobile chat, mobile games, mobile TV, and mobile banking, among others. Mobile service providers seem optimistic about customer acceptance and future development of AMS. However, market analysis indicates that the actual use is still far from reaching market potential (Constantiou, 2009). This situation represents a paradox. On one hand, customers undoubtedly feel strong attachment to their mobile devices (Wilska, 2003). They have full control of selecting service type and deciding when and where to use the services. On the other hand, these sophisticated services have a low penetration rate. Consequently, investigating the underlying drivers of actual AMS use is crucial for service providers to better formulate their service marketing strategy and to devise specifically tailored marketing strategies to convert non-adopters to adopters. Furthermore, such investigation can provide insights into factors that service providers might leverage to promote effective and ongoing AMS use.

This study extends research exploring customer intention to use AMS (Lu et al., 2008, Mallat et al., 2009) by examining how customers' actual experience with such service consumption shapes their usage behavior. More specifically, this study's purpose is to develop a conceptual framework of AMS use in the post-adoption context. The proposed framework considers service ubiquity's role in enhancing customers' experiential value by exploring intrinsic and extrinsic motivations of such service consumption. Previous researchers treat the influencing factors of mobile service adoption separately; however, this investigation asserts that intrinsic and extrinsic service use motivations occur simultaneously and require concurrent evaluation. This study examines the influence of experiential value and customer satisfaction on actual service use as well as how business and leisure customers use AMS differently.