Track: Technology Management

Abstract

The emergence of new technology is changing customer needs and customer behavior in many different ways, such as decreased customer attention, the need for personalization, and increasing customer expectations (Mansoor 2017). Meanwhile, for many companies in the market, only higher margins can bring profit, which needs to be gained by the acquisition of greater and steadier market share (Abbasi et al. 2016). Therefore, attracting more customers is key for growth and profitability. Customer acceptance models, such as Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Diffusion of Innovation (DIO), Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), were used in previous research to help banking systems with new products or new functions to attract customers (Abbasi et al. 2016). However, in most of the research approaches the problem is seen form a single perspective. This work aims at defining and modelling customer adoption behavior on mobile banking using a systems thinking approach, in particular, qualitative modelling using causal loop diagrams. The method in this work integrated a grounded theory approach and a systems thinking approach to identify the variables and their relationships from the literature review of relevant studies. The relationships between the variables were used to draw up causal loop diagrams. Five different perspectives were drawn from the literature to develop the diagrams through several iterations and discussions. The diagrams were brought together and analyzed to provide a proposal for effectively managing adoption in the mobile banking industry.  This study and the causal loop diagrams serve as a reference for providing a methodology and framework for future research that hopes to investigate any problems in a sustainable way and from a systemic perspective. For example, the beef industry, the energy industry, the agricultural industry, and health systems already have broken the traditional linear problem solving and use systems thinking to solve many of their problems. The causal loop diagrams also serve as a reference for future investigations to identify customer adoption behavior on different technologies or products. More specifically, for the research in new banking product adoption, this study is a valuable framework that suggests that the problem should be considered from the specific perspectives of customer psychology, economic, social, innovation and technological perspectives. New factors in different perspectives could be added to the causal loop diagrams to see how the factors affect the whole system in each case. The causal loop diagrams could be further developed into a quantitative system dynamics model to build and run simulations to analyze system performance under different scenarios (Hjorth and Bagheri 2006). The research also indicates that in most situations, drawing a CLDs is enough for identify a system, however, to see how the basic reference modes of the system vary through time, the research can go further and build up a simulation model and run it in a virtual environment. That is where this project hopes to do.