Customer Self-Efficacy in Technology-Based Self-Service: Assessing Between- and Within-Person Differences

Firms increasingly offer customers the opportunity to coproduce self-service using online technologies. This requires novice customers to adopt a new role and engage in information search. This is particularly challenging in complex, high-risk services, such as online investment trading. Actively managing customers' task-specific self-confidence, or self-efficacy, in these types of technology-based self-service (tbss) may convert novice customers into regular users and thereby increase return on investments. The authors show that self-efficacy increases novice customers' financial performance perceptions, service value evaluations, and future usage intentions. During online information search, novices focus on credibility and argument quality cues to determine their self-efficacy. The effects differ across information sources; third-party credibility and firm argument quality are most influential. Moreover, when consumers are highly engaged in their self-service role, the impact of credibility is strengthened, whereas that of argument quality is attenuated.