Paper Title
Developing a Typology of Requisite Skills For Financial Services Employees to Enhance Self-Service Technology Usage: The Case of the South African Banking Industry

Abstract
Financial services institutions invest in self–service technologies (SST) for various reasons. These include the demands to rationalise costs and to meet the channel preferences of a ‘technology- savvy’ client base. Retail banks experience various migration-related costs when migrating customers to an SST environment; in terms of both branch infrastructure and the development of employee skills. Some customers continue to favour face-to-face service interactions, which necessitates an identification and evaluation of the necessary skills required by employees to facilitate this migration process. This research aims to both identify and classify the requisite skills needed by financial services professionals to enable them to migrate customers from physical to electronic service channels. With the appropriate training and competencies, employees can guide customers more effectively through the migration process in a non-judgemental way. The lack of support from skilled service employees has, in many instances, led to customers paying higher transactional fees and experiencing inconveniences at physical channels, thereby resulting in overall lower self-service usage. Key words- Self-service technology; electronic channels; up-skilled; customer experience; migration; adoption; Automated teller machine; prerequisite skills; usage;ease of use.