Reasons barring customers from using internet banking in Iran : an integrated approach based on means-end chains and segmentation

The advent of information technology has influenced the banking industry to a great extent. It has made the banks able to perform their tasks more effectively. It has also enabled them to offer some of their services through self-service technologies (SSTs). One of the newest channels through which these SSTs have been offered is Internet which is broadly known as Internet banking. When compared to other payment channels, Internet has seen to offer many advantages both for banks and for customers. However, only a small portion of Iranian bank customers are Internet banking users. The purpose of this study is to find out why Iranian bank customers, in particular, those bank customers to whom Internet banking services have already been offered are not using Internet banking. Further more, when non-adopters comprise the majority of the population, describing all non-adopters as one homogeneous group may not be accurate. Hence, the second objective of this study is to find the homogeneous groups (segments) of Internet banking non-adopters. For this purpose, Association Pattern Techniques (APT) was applied which is a two-stage method and has its foundations in the mean-end theory. In the first stage, 32 Iranian bank customers were interviewed in-depth using laddering interviewing technique. Based on these interviews, literature review, and the approach of APT, a questionnaire was developed. This questionnaire was distributed among the customers of EN Bank in 12 branches of the province of Tehran. Totally 507 questionnaires were collected. The analysis results of the collected data indicate that the main reasons which bar these customers from using Internet banking are lack of knowledge about Internet banking, lack of trust in the system, and limited Internet banking services. Further analysis revealed that different customers indeed had different reasons for not using Internet banking. The cluster analysis revealed five segments of Internet banking non-adopters, namely, Skeptics, Traditional clients, The Distrustful, The Time-conscientious, and The Cost- sensitive. The description of each segment and respective suggestions for each segment are provided.Validerat; 20101217 (root