Assessing the Impact of Relationship Quality on Online Adoption

Relationships are strongly embedded in Indian culture due to its high-context nature. Because of this, the role of relationship marketing has been advanced in a variety of services viz., banking, retailing, telecom, etc and hence the competition amongst various service providers has increased. Traditionally, relationship management used to be personal interaction based phenomenon but with IT as an enabler for online channels, the need for creating and growing relationships have transpired in a big way. With the advent of technological changes in the business environment, customers are seeking better alternatives to reduce the frequency of visiting the bank branch physically and are relying more on the virtual mode for transacting. Hence, banks and other service organizations are strongly focussing on the digital (online) channels for facilitating monetary transactions and hence gaining competitive advantage. In the virtual mode, the concept of relationships appears to be unrealistic due to the absence of human interface. However, significant studies have been conducted in this regard which focus on the influence of relationship quality factors viz., trust, commitment, satisfaction, etc. towards adopting the online channel for carrying out financial transactions. Relationship quality focuses on evaluating the strength of relationships, which affects customer loyalty. There exists a dearth of such significant studies in the Indian context. The present research will focus on bridging this gap in the literature. This paper will follow a causal research design for empirically analysing the impact of RQ factors towards adopting online mode for banking transactions. It will also investigate the future intentions of the customers toward using the online channels for carrying out financial transactions