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

Author :Thaver, G, Naicker, V

Article Citation :Thaver ,G ,Naicker ,V , (2017 ) " Developing a Typology of Requisite Skills For Financial Services Employees to Enhance Self-Service Technology Usage: The Case of the South African Banking Industry " , International Journal of Management and Applied Science (IJMAS) , pp. 43-53, Volume-3,Issue-1, Special Issue-1

Abstract : Financial services institutions invest in self–service technologies for various reasons. These include the demands to rationalise costs and to meet the channel preferences of a ‘technology-savvy’ client base. Some advantages of self–service technologies (“SSTs”) include the optimisation of staff activities and faster and improved customer services. 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. This study 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; including ATMs. A ‘mixed method’ approach was used to capture the data. LISREL and AMOS were used for checking of distributional assumptions, imputing data for missing observations and calculating summary statistics. The research concluded that employees need to be sensitive to possible resistance from clients to using new technologies and employees should be trained on how guide clients in non-judgemental ways. Special attention should be given to the customer’s right to select the channel of their choice. Therefore, institutions should guard against any directive to ‘force-migrate’ customers to new digital platforms as a business policy. Keywords— Self-service technology; electronic channels; up-skilled; customer experience; migration; adoption; Automated teller machine; prerequisite skills; usage; ease of use.

Type : Research paper

Published : Volume-3,Issue-1, Special Issue-1

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