User Acceptance of Customer Self-Service Portals

The attitude of users towards an online customer self-service portal, which is newly introduced by one of the biggest finance companies worldwide, is the focus of this article. The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), proposed by Davis in 1986, is applied to evaluate 521 customer responses to a questionnaire consisting of 22 questions. The authors choose partial least squares (PLS) as statistical instrument and define "attitude of customers towards the online self-service portal" as the dependent variable. Apart from this, six factors are specified to directly or indirectly correlate with attitude. It is found that self-efficacy, innovation anxiety and innovation affinity correlate both directly and indirectly with attitude whereas the mediator for the indirect impact is perceived ease of use. Furthermore, value of paper form correlates directly and indirectly with attitude whereas in this case perceived usefulness is the mediator for the indirect link. Comparing both mediators, perceived usefulness is found to influence attitude of customers towards the online portal by more than 50% than perceived ease of use does. The article is structured into an introductory part where the applied methods are investigated shortly and a description of the theoretical background of the TAM, followed by a description of the applied model. Afterwards, the reader finds a description of the generated results while the last parts discuss and conclude the stated findings. The leading question of research within this paper is: Which factors influence user acceptance of a new customer self-service portal?