Mobile online services and measuring user satisfaction: Study of Kuwait
Tami Alzabi
Asadallah Shah
Information technology department International Islamic University Malaysia KL, Malaysia
[email protected]
Information technology department International Islamic University Malaysia KL, Malaysia
[email protected]
Abstract—User satisfaction is the key of success for any company to succeed and flourish business. Due to tremendous competition among service providers in the online sectors, many competitors feel threaten to be marginalized and loose competitive edge, and so is the profit margin. For many companies to survive business in a highly completive environment, user satisfaction may be such factor to achieve lead over others. User satisfaction is a strong construct that emphasize on factors such as information quality, system quality, and service quality as its key parameters. This study aims to measure user satisfaction for online services provided by mobile companies in Kuwait and to develop a multi-scale model and assess its applicability in Kuwait scenario. This study involves exploratory factor analysis method to measure user satisfaction. The result showed that service quality, system quality, information quality are apex variable for user satisfaction for companies who compete in Kuwait in telecom sector. Keywords—user satisfaction; information quality; system quality; service quality; online service in Kuwait;
I.
Introduction
The development of Internet technology has transformed many businesses from offline to online. This is a growing trend since a decade or so. As more and more companies have transformed business from offline to online, many companies are facing stiffer competitions from others operating in the same domain of business.
Online service are believed to offer more convenience, faster information seeking and better transactions with improved efficiency over conventional channels [1]. Online services could be conducted through various sophisticated tools such as (Smartphone, Laptop, PC, and Tablet device) and the commonly used services involves subscriptions, paying bills, and customer services [2]. It is not surprising that paying bills online is becoming normal practice for many users of online services. Perhaps this motivated a large proportion of business sector to invest and to do business online; thus providing online services to their customers. As stated in [3] mobile communication companies’ online services have proliferated and already leading to reshaping the customer and supplier relationships [3]. Despite the increasing attempts to provide services online and the managing investments to launch websites have ended up with disappointment without recognizable benefits. The one of main causes for disappointment is user satisfaction [4]. Therefore, there is a need for businesses to evaluate their websites functionalities in order to maximize the user satisfaction of customers to realize benefits and compete for additive advantage [4]. Current approaches for the customer satisfaction of mobile communication fail to adequately address overall users’ concerns about the information, system, and service quality provided by telecom companies. An extensive search of related literature established that there is no such multi-item scale available to measure the Kuwait mobile communication company’s online services success with relation to user satisfaction.
This study is intended not only to further enhance management’s ability to understand the customers’ level of satisfaction of their services, but also act as an indicator to reveal the weaknesses and strengths of the online services in Kuwait. A website, however, is an advertising/sales channel (sometimes a business’s sole interface) between the businesses, customers and the world at large. Therefore, online usage covers the users' interactions with online services provided [5]. This study focuses on user satisfaction with online services offered by mobile communication companies in Kuwait. Currently, in Kuwait, online customers use services for paying bills, subscribe internet, download ringtones and check for product promotion and services. Mobile companies are trying to satisfy their consumers by employing various approaches to enhance the quality of online services for user satisfaction. Besides that, those mobile communication providers promote using their online services to their customers by attaching links to online services to encourage customer to use. The major online service, heavily used by people surveyed in this study, was paying bills. The main reason behind using that service was the Knet payment service. It is a national company providing electronic banking services to all the banks in Kuwait. Subscribers who have an account in bank in Kuwait could use Knet service to pay online which is considered as an alternative method of credit cards (http://www.knet.com.kw).
II.
Literature Review
The role of Information technology (IT) is significantly increasing in business development where many fields such as learning, shopping, marketing, travel, trading become online with assistance of IT [6, 7]. Advancements in Internet and communication technology transformed the world. The combination of information and communication technology is showing enormous changes across the world [7]. The dramatic changes emerged in 1995, when e-commerce, ebusiness, and m-business (mobile business) have grown tremendously. IT facilitates business customer to access services globally, such as internet, and mobile services [7, 8]. According to Zhou [9] telecommunication sector, using internet through
mobiles, and doing business become inseparable. In Kuwait, according to Ministry of Communication (MoC), the users of mobile phone increasingly rise year-to-year and hit 161% of penetration rate in 2013. This rapid growth shows serious role of online services and mobile phones in the business in the future. Mobile services such as internet access have tremendously grown within short period of time [10, 11]. Now the concern is how to retain customers among competitive advantage. Online service is the application of IT by organizational agencies to improve the activities and enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of information and services delivery among organizations, business and citizens [12]. The user satisfaction is defined as the “perception of the pleasurable fulfilment of a service [12], [13]. The term “experience” can be made more specific to focus upon different aspects related to the information system (e.g., computing, training) [13]. Previous studies have reported many criteria to get high performance online service and achieved user satisfaction, however, the study by [7] saw that some of those criteria may waste the limited resource of firms and there is a need for new approach to minimize those criteria and focus on most critical criteria. However, the limited resource may not be considerable issue to the mobile communication providers in Kuwait. Similar studies are conducted in China [14], found that the three constructs of service quality (interaction quality, environment quality and outcome quality) significantly and positively effects on cumulative satisfaction. Table 1 lists the most important factors which influence user satisfaction. Those factors are related to maximum quality of services, information, system, and user interface. Besides that, security is considerable as well as a factor for user satisfaction. Table 1: user satisfaction factors summary Author Ozer, et al. [8]
Construct Quality of Mobile online Service
Relationship Positively related to customer satisfaction
[9, 10]
Quality of
Positively
Items tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. Other items reported reliability, access, ease of use, personalization, security and credibility reliability,
online service
related
[11]
Security
Positively related
[14]
Mobile service Quality
Positively related to user satisfactions and intention to use
[15]
Quality affects user satisfaction
Positively related
III.
responsiveness, ease of use privacy, trust, accessibility, awareness, task-fit, monetary value, connectivity, personal innovativeness, and absorptive capacity Interaction quality, environment quality and outcome quality
Motivation of research
In this study, the three mobile telecommunication companies’ services are investigated. The telecomm industry is saturated in Kuwait with 6.269 million subscribers and the penetration rate hits 161.7% at the end of June of 2013 [16]. The population in Kuwait is above 4 million according to official Kuwait website (www.paci.gov.kw). Mobile companies face competitive environment. Therefore, companies in telecomm industry increasingly compete with each other to retain their clients and attract new consumers through service satisfaction as a key factor. In other words, the online services need to deliver quality system, information and services. Consequently, based on the previous the proposed model show the key factors as shown in figure 1 is to be tested.
• •
Service quality adopted from Ozer, et al. [8], Zhou [9], Cullen [17], Turel and Serenko [18], Chang and Chong [19]. The factors under this construct are reliability, tangibility, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. Study of Cullen [17] proved this construct is positively impact the user satisfaction with online services. System quality adopted from studies Li and Yeh [20], MatNor, et al. [21], Lee, et al. [22]. Information quality adopted from Susanto, et al. [23].
IV.
User Satisfaction (US)
Service Quality (ServQ)
Figure 1: The proposed model
Those three constructs have been adopted from:
Questionnaire survey
The questionnaire was developed that consists of five sections: demographic, information quality, service quality, system quality, and user satisfaction. The targeted population of this study is the university students and employees of oil sector, banking sector, and others who have adopted technology and consequently those people tend to use online service of mobile communication companies. The questionnaire was distributed among respondents by post. The questions are related to factors such as information quality, service quality, system quality and user satisfaction there were 47 questions in the survey. The reliability is tested by Cronbach’s Alpha and that is 94%; which is considered significant for internal consistency. Next section discusses the results.
V.
Information Quality (IQ)
System Quality (SQ)
•
Results and Discussion
The 300 sets of questionnaires were distributed and out of 300 targeted respondents 254 responses were received. The demographic information of the respondents is presented in table 2. It can be seen that male participants represents 59.4% and female represented 40.6%. In terms of age, participations within age 18-29 are 59.8%, 30-39 are 23% and 16.5% are above 40. Further undergraduate participants were 67.7% while postgraduate participants were 14.6%. Participants from oil sector were 30.3%, the remaining are students (37%), bankers
(21.3%), or others (11%). In terms of mobile subscription, participants who reported their subscription to Zain mobile operators were 44.9%, others reported their subscriptions to Ooredoo and Viva by 31.5% and 23.6 respectively. Table 2: Demographic data of participants Features Gender Age Nationality
Education Job
Access devices Internet/mobile provider Service usage
Payment Method
N (=254) Male Female 18-29 30-39 +40 Kuwaiti Egyptian Indain Others Secondary School Undergraduate Postgraduate Student Oil Sector Bank sector Others PC/Laptop Smart phone/tablet Zain Ooredoo Viva Daily Weekly Monthly Occasionally KNET Services Credit Card Services Others
151 103 152 60 42 176 22 26 30 45 172 37 95 77 54 28 41 213 114
% 59.4 40.6 59.8 23.6 16.5 69.3 8.7 10.2 11.8 17.7 67.7 14.6 37.4 30.3 21.3 11.0 16.1 83.9 44.9
80 60 122 49 58 25 190 42
31.5 23.6 48 19.3 22.8 9.8` 74.8 16.5
22
8.7
The model items were analyzed using principal component exploratory factor analysis with varimax rotation to examine their dimensionality. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin value was 0.91, exceeding the recommended value of 0.6 and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity reached statistical significance, supported the factorability of the correlation matrix (Pallant, 2007; Tabachnik & Fidell, 2007). The items distributed into four factors with factor loadings greater than 0.4 were retained to establish the practically significant development (Hair et al., 2010). The factor solution is presented in Table 3.
Table 3: Factor Loadings of the items retained Items IQ 1.Online mobile services .626 provide me with accurate
SQ
ServQ
US
information. 2.Online mobile services provide me with meaningful information. 3.Online mobile services send SMSs to my mobile that have important feedback. 4.Online mobile Services provide me with relevant information. 5.Online mobile Services provide a Q&A for value-added Services. 6.Online mobile services provide me with up-to-da information. 7.Online mobile services provide me available use a time suitable. 8.Online mobile services provide me with sufficien information. 9.Online mobile services provide diversified value-added services. 10.Online mobile services provide good post-services. 11.Online mobile services provide multiple tariff options. 12.I can easily use the online mobile services. 13.I can clearly understan position of the screen I am currently browsing in the navigation layout. 14.The design of the homepage of online mobi services can help me to ea find the location of the required information. 15.Online Mobile Service page provides effective lin 16.I can easily return to th screens previously brows 17.Online mobile services reached at anytime from anywhere. 18.Online mobile service easy to use. 19.Online mobile services visually attractive. 20.Online mobile services generally use good images 21.Online mobile service generally use informative Well-designed icons. 22.Online mobile service well-designed animation. 23.Online mobile services beautiful and attractive co
.746
.612
.660 .599
.761 .729 .767 .649
.663 .604
.572
.583
.692
.686 .638 .682 .787 .676 .702 .651 .614 .698
24.Online mobile services good fonts and acceptable font sizes. 25.Online mobile services homepage is not overcrow 26.The site of online mobi services is stable. 27.The site of online mobi services is instantly react t my input data. 28.My mobile company provides on-time mobile services. 29.My mobile company processes quickly the required services. 30.Online mobile services provided from my Compa do not take much time. 31.My mobile company provides prompt respons 32.My mobile company provides prompt chat in online . 33.My mobile company provides prompt delivery service 34.My mobile company provides is trustworthy mobile services. 35.My mobile company provides personalized mo services. 36.My mobile company provides secure and truste services. 37.My mobile company provides secured services 38.My mobile company provides online mobile services with high reputati 39.I feel satisfied and trus with my company online mobile services. 40.I feel satisfied and loya with my company online mobile services. 41.I feel pleased with usin my company online mobi services. 42.My intentions are to continue using my compa online mobile services tha use any alternative means 43.I intend to continue usi my company online mobi services and recommend family and friends.
.572
(information quality, system quality and service quality).
.598
VI.
Future work
.524
.671
User satisfaction is quite important key indicator of success for organizations, this study developed factors to measure user satisfaction among the mobile subscribers in Kuwait regarding online services introduced by mobile providers. The developed factors were information quality, system quality and service quality. This study presented exploratory factor analysis and determined the factors. The contribution of this paper is presented by developing factors to measure user satisfaction towards online services provided in Kuwait by mobile communication providers. The significant growth of mobile communication and severe competition between providers make this study important for providers to increase the quality of their services. Besides that, this paper tried to bring factors for multidimensional model for user satisfaction with online service use.
.667
References
.471 .674 .749 .604 .624 .535 .603 .725 .651
.676 [1] .826 [2] .831 .867 .804
.832
Factor loadings of items were significant all above 0.5, except the item 27.The factor analysis shows that those items are appropriate to measure user satisfaction with those constructs
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