Customer satisfaction with vendor-provided information services: Antecedents and behavioral consequences of user attitudes

In this study, 335 managers in medium size US commercial banks were surveyed by mail in order to investigate the antecedents and behavioral consequences of customer satisfaction with vendor-provided information services (VPIS Satisfaction). The sample included customers of several classes of information service vendors.; The research investigated the hypothesis that the satisfaction construct in the IS domain can be theoretically grounded in attitude theory. Based on the conceptual definitions of the Theory of Reasoned Action, VPIS Satisfaction was modeled as an attitude system comprised of two components: belief and attitude. Within this system, attitude is a simple, bipolar evaluative response directed at a particular target. Beliefs consist of the information an individual has about the target, whether fact or opinion. VPIS Satisfaction was hypothesized to consist of three distinct but related attitudes toward the system, the vendor, and the price.; Findings suggest that managers possess a single, generalized attitude (VPIS Satisfaction Attitude) directed toward the system/vendor/price gestalt. The generalized Satisfaction Attitude was determined by three classes of beliefs: vendor attributes, price attributes, and system referent-comparisons, which accounted for 71% of the variance in the VPIS Satisfaction Attitude. System referent-comparisons made the largest unique contribution to the explained variance in VPIS Satisfaction. System attributes, previously the most widely investigated antecedents of satisfaction made no unique contribution. As hypothesized, the attitude system (target beliefs plus attitude) fully mediated the effects of external variables on behavior in two out of three cases.; Three categories of satisfaction-related behaviors were identified: (1) helping behaviors, (2) switching behaviors, and (3) complaining behaviors. Of these three classes, helping behaviors appear to have the strongest relationship with satisfaction. Negative behaviors such as switching and complaining appear to have more complex determinants. Of the behaviors identified as being most strongly related to satisfaction, none had system usage or system exploration as their primary focus. Behaviors that are most strongly related to satisfaction appear to be non-system oriented, and instead deal with various aspects of the relationship between the vendor and the customer.; The importance of the vendor-customer relationship in determining VPIS Satisfaction was reinforced by an exploratory investigation of external variables, which found that trust, relative influence, and the vendor's management of the system conversion were the most robust antecedents of satisfaction-related behaviors.