Matching Service Delivery to Market Requirements

The growth of electronic commerce has forced firms to rethink how they deliver a service to their customers. Not only is the face-to-face human interaction lost, but the concept of neighborhood services has given way to business unconstrained by geographic boundaries. For services, the service delivery process would seem to be markedly altered by the lack of human interaction and geographic boundaries. This forces companies wishing to sell services in an electronic environment to reexamine the key elements of their service process and the relationships between service process and market requirements. Nowhere is the effect of electronic commerce more evident than in the banking industry. This study investigated relationships among company factors, process selection and business performance for service delivery via electronic commerce, using online banking as an example of a nearly pure service delivered electronically. The results indicate that cost savings motivation and likelihood of technology adoption are important predictors of process selection. Additionally, process selection is an important predictor of business performance.