Research On Customer Trust Of Customized Electronic Service

The customized e-service is a new kind of online transaction, with its distinctivecharacteristics that customers can personalize their service or value-added goods meetingtheir personal demands on the internet. In this context, customers are not only buyers, butalso designers and even producers of a service. Similarly, service vendors are not justsellers, they will cooperate with customers to fulfill the personalized service or goods. Thisfeature distinguishes the transactions from those in entity stores or e-commerce which soldhomogenized goods. A service is different from tangible goods, it is intangible,heterogeneous, inseperatable and perishable, which make it hard to be perceived anddetermined directly. Howerver, there is still lack of related literatures on customizede-service behavior. In the context of e-commerce selling homogenious entity goods, trust isimport to customers’ buying intention. Nevertheless, what factors will affect a customer’sbuying intention in a customized e-service? What is the mechanism of customer trustconstruction? What effects will customer trust put on customers’ buying intention duringservice interactions? How the service-related factors and customer trust will affect thebuying intention jointly? The existing literatures can not accurately explain all the questionsabove. The author of this thesis implemented a research to fill up the insufficiency in thetheory, and provided managerial implications to e-service vendors for marketing.The research scheme is constitute of four relatively independent studies, but withendogenous relations. Based on Symbolic Interaction Theory, the first study constructed aninteraction model for e-service customization, which revealed the relations amongcustomers, vendors and e-service systems for customization, along with the thepsychological mechanism of interactional behavior. Then we analyzed the process ofcustomer trust construction based on Semiotics. The Semiotics model uncovered themechanism of trust building. In this procedure, the key part is that customers “suspend”uncertainty to bridge the part of “trust explanation” and “trust expection”.The second study implemented a behavioural experiment, through which the effects oncustomers’ buying intention from customers’ trust disposition and vendors’ serviceprovision were disclosed. Based on the dyadic model of trust, we designed a two-wayANOVA experiment, which took customers’ trust disposition and vendors’ serviceprovision as independent variables, service experience, trust perception and buyingintention as dependent variables. We invited college students as responses to complete theexperiment. Results revealed that there were significant interacting effects on service experience and trust perception, but not significant on buying intention. However, there wasstill significant main effect on buying intention from trust disposition. Further analysisrevealed that those interacting effects were significant only in the condition of sufficientservice provision.The role of customer trust during an e-service customization was focused in the thirdstudy. The analysis on the experiment data showed that customer trust partially mediatedthe relation between service experience and buying intention. And then we released asurvey to the users of the e-service customization. The results of structural equationmodeling validated the mediating effect of customer trust, which is coincidence with theresults of former behavioural experiment. Research results revealed that trust is the directfactor affecting buying intention, and service experience put its effect on buying intentionthrough trust.In the last study, we tested the relations of service quality, perceived value, customersatisfaction, customer trust and their effects on buying intention. We got users’ behavioraldata on a real website providing e-service customization through a survey with experimenttask. Results of structural equation modeling disclosed that website efficiency affectedperceived value significantly, but not sigficant on customer satisfaction, systems avalibilityput its effects on perceived value and customer satisfaction significantly, but orderfulfillment promise only affected customer satisfaction significantly. Additionally, the effectof perceived value on customer satisfaction was not significant, customer satisfaction’seffect on buying intention was higher than that from perceived value, but perceived valueput higher effect on buying intention than customer satisfaction. Importantly, customer trustmediated the relation of perceived value to buying intention, and it also mediated customersatisfaction to buying intention, which confirmed the results of former study.Important conclusions were drawn in the research:(1) Customers and vendorsconstructed a psychological intersection when the both made interactions in e-servicecustomization, which is the premise that an e-serivce can be implemented; and it is the keypart that customers “suspend” uncertainty to form their trust intensions.(2) Disclosed thateffects of trust disposition on service experience, trust perception and buying intention, theeffects on service experience and trust perception were contigent on service provision.(3)In the procedure of constructing buying intention, customer trust mediated the relation fromservice experience to buying intention, which revealed that trust is the direct factoraffecting buying intention and service experience put its effect on buying intention through trust.(4) E-service quality put effects on buying intention through peveived value andcustomer satisfaction, among which customer trust mediated the relations of perceivedvalue to buying intentionand customer satisfaction to buying intention, the role of trust inthe process distinguished the model from that of post buying model.The research made its contributions as following: Firstly, the dyadic perspective wasemployed to explore e-service customization behavior, which is the innovation to onlinetrust behavior, different from many related literatures, we did not take the rationalhypothesis as prerequisite. Secondly, the effects on customers’ behavioral intention fromcustomers’ trust disposition were uncovered, the author introduced dyadic model ofinter-personal trust into e-service customization behavior research, which expanded theonline trust theories. The third, the mediating effect of customer trust on the relation ofservice experience and buying intention was validated, which revealed the mechanism ofbuying intention construction from the view of procedure. The fourth, the factorsexplaining post buying behavior were introduced into the research of pre buying behaviorof e-service customization, in which customer trust was added and distinctive conclusionswere drawn.There are managerial implications to e-service vendors for the marketing: In the first,improving service provision is an effective way to promote barging. The second, it isworthwhile for e-service vendors to make marketing strategies based on personaldifferences, and thus supply different service interactions and remedy strategies tocustomers with different trust disposition. In the third, the mediating effects of customertrust in service interactions should be paid attention, the improvements on customer trustwill be helpful to promote barging.