Customer adoption of technology-based self-service: a case study on airport self check-in service

Abstract: With an increasing investment in self service technologies, companies have the possibilities to realize industrialization of service offerings. That means companies could satisfy customers at a lower cost. But before companies can benefit from self-service technologies, the willingness of customers to try out and adopt technology-based self-service (TBSS) should be questioned since such a service option requires many efforts from customers and changes their behaviour and habit to some extend. The purpose of this research is to contribute to understanding customers' adoption behaviour of TBSS. Based on a classic adoption theory and extant TBSS researches, the research purpose is realized by investigating the customers' different adoption behaviour and how they relate to innovation attributes, customer characteristics and situational factors. This research is mainly a descriptive and explanatory research based on the literature reviews. Exploratory research has also been included in the pilot study in order to refine the conceptual framework and questionnaire. Qualitative approach was mainly used in pilot study and quantitative approach was mainly used in later empirical study for a case setting as the self check-in service at airports. 96 samples of respondents were interviewed based on the questionnaire. Data analysis is mainly based on the quantitative results, supported by the qualitative information and literature reviews. A lot of findings were produced by this research. Three distinct stages in the customer adoption process, namely avoid using, trial and repeat using, are very important to understand customers' adoption behaviour of TBSS. Relative advantages, easy to use and control were found as important innovation attributes relate to different adoption behaviour. Need for avoiding interaction and consumption rate were found to be important factors among customer characteristics. Finally in terms of situational factors, relative length of waiting lines at alternative check-ins and whether the environment is crowded are important factors to affect customers' adoption behaviour.