The Impact of Cognitive versus Affective Aspects on Consumer Usage of Financial Service Delivery Channels

Technology

Channel technologies, through their impact on firms’ delivery systems, represent a major
stake for service providers (Roth and Velde, 1989; Dabholkar, 1996). The context in which
decisions are taken is changing, as technology developments increasingly allow for remote
service encounters. Additionally, these new delivery options parallel market social trends.
The replacement of human service by a technology usually requires both the development of
new knowledge and behavior associated with the service, and also increased customer
participation and responsibility in the production of the service. Concerning financial
services, information technology is fundamentally changing the financial services industry
worldwide, altering traditional definitions of product, market and customer base (Pyun et al.,
2002). How customers react to this ‘technology infusion’ (Bitner et al., 2000) is something
that needs to be understood so that firms may benefit from the technological element in their
service provision.

Banks and other financial institutions had assumed that customers would accept and
prefer less personal attention and learn the new systems. Customers’ attitudes toward
technology and financial services delivery are changing (Harden, 2002). Some customer
segments are becoming more technically and financially savvy, which motivates them to self-
manage their financial investments (Devlin, 1995; Kimball et al., 1997; Mulligan and
Gordon, 2002) and to use self-service delivery channels. However, evidence suggests that
fewer customers than anticipated have accepted the banks’ perspective and embraced the new
technologies (Sarel and Marmorstein, 2002).

The potential success of self-service technologies depends of customers’ acceptance.
This has led researchers to consider self-service technologies as a ‘double-edged sword’ (Lee
and Allaway, 2002; Walker et al., 2002), and as involving ‘technology paradoxes’ (Mick and
Fournier, 1998). Successful self-service technologies improve service firms’ resource
management by lowering delivery costs and releasing service personnel to provide more
varied and better service (Berry, 1985), but unsuccessful ones add nothing but extra fixed and
operational costs (Lee and Allaway, 2002).

Consumer Behavior

There is debate in the consumer behavior literature over which component(s), cognitive
and/or affective, induces behavior and, for a long time, the prevailing opinion was that
cognitive processes were the trigger to attitude formation and behavior (Fishbein and Ajzen,
1975; Ajzen and Fishbein, 1980; Poczter, 1987; Ajzen, 1991). These contributions are based

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