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The role of technology in customer-company interactions and the number of technology-based products and services have been growing rapidly. Although these developments have benefited customers, there is also evidence of increasing customer frustration in dealing with technology-based systems. Drawing on insights from the extant literature and extensive qualitative research on customer reactions to technology, this article first proposes the construct of technology readiness of people and discusses its conceptualization. It then describes a program of research that was undertaken to operationalize the construct, develop and refine a multiple-item scale to measure it, and assess the scale's psychometric properties. The article concludes with a discussion of potential practical applications of the scale and an agenda for additional research aimed at deepening our understanding of technology's role in marketing to and serving customers.
Companies' use of technology in selling to and serving customers is growing at a fast pace. Likewise, customers are dealing with products and services that are becoming increasingly sophisticated from a technological standpoint. As such, the nature of company-customer interactions is undergoing fundamental transformations with far-reaching implications for both companies and customers. For instance, a major consequence of technology's growing role is a commensurate growth in self-service technologies that call for customers to interact with technology-based systems rather than company personnel (Bitner, Brown, and Meuter 2000; Dabholkar 2000; Meuter et al. 2000). Yet, there has been little scholarly research pertaining to people's readiness to use such systems.
This research void is especially critical because the increasing incidence of customers having to serve themselves through technology-based systems is germane not only to service companies but also to goods companies. As Rust (1998) argues, all products are really services, and "most goods businesses now view themselves primarily as services, with the offered good being an important part of the service (rather than the service being an augmentation of the physical good)" (p. 107). In a similar vein, Bitner, Brown, and Meuter (2000), emphasizing the fact that virtually all firms compete on the basis of customer service and service offerings, propose an expanded conceptualization of services that transcends industry boundaries. They also highlight the absence of a technology focus in service encounter research.
Although scholarly research on people's readiness to use technology-based systems is sparse,...