Full length articleService quality, satisfaction, stickiness, and usage intentions: An exploratory evaluation in the context of WeChat services
Introduction
With advances in Internet technology and the popularity of smart phones, WeChat (or “WeiXin” as it is known domestically in China) has been the major instant messaging (IM) communication service provider in China, which is particularly attractive to younger generations (Lien & Cao, 2014). IM provides text, video, and voice communication services to users and has become an important social media platform. With the presence of IM, people communicate in a way which is similar to face-to-face communication (Wang, Hsieh, & Song, 2012). WeChat was developed by Tencent in 2011 and is a free messaging and calling app that allows you to easily connect with family and friends across countries. According to the Tencent 2016 Second Quarter and Interim Results (http://www.tencent.com/en-us/content/at/2016/attachments/20160817.pdf), far over three fourth a billion WeChat users are monthly active users. The monthly active users are defined as the total number of WeChat users sending out at least one message during the last calendar month prior to the relevant date (Tencent 2016 Second Quarter and Interim Results). To further engage WeChat users with the WeChat brand, Tencent provides WeChat users in major cities with access to local public services such as transportation, utilities, healthcare and municipal services. A few notable municipal service examples include the WeChat application of marriage registration, the verification of a person's traffic violation records, real-time traffic condition, driving license points, and/or city public transportation account through his/her active WeChat account (Shanghai Daily, 2015). WeChat has been explicitly designed to act more like apps (e.g., WhatsApp) which are familiar to Western users and allows Chinese and those outside of China to communicate within the same social network without restriction. The embedded features such as push-to-talk, video chatting, group chats, and the options for dynamic interaction make WeChat offer more functions than any single Western app (PR Newswire, 2013). WeChat provides users a private space meaning that only people you have admitted to your friend list can view your posts and comment on them. WeChat's friend circle has been a popular application, and it is convenient to add your friends from cell phone's contact list to WeChat's. WeChat is now deeply ingrained into the daily life of Chinese people (Lien & Cao, 2014).
Usage intention is the likelihood that a customer will use a particular product/service (Kowatsch & Maass, 2010). Customers' intentions to use a company's service influences their actual behaviors which, in turn, determines a firm's success (Zhao, Lu, Zhang, & Chau, 2012). Therefore, understanding the antecedents of customers' usage intentions is very important. It provides a service company an opportunity to enhance its customers' willingness to use the service. Reviewing the Internet and mobile service literature reveals that service quality (Lin et al., 2008, Zhao et al., 2012), satisfaction (Chen et al., 2012, Lai, 2004, Zhao et al., 2012), and stickiness (Chang and Cheung, 2001, Huang and Lin, 2011) are determinants directly or indirectly influencing usage intentions. Service quality is a customer's overall assessment of the service provider's performance (Lien et al., 2014, Parasuraman et al., 1991) and has been one of the most significantly studied issues in services marketing (Olorunniwo and Hsu, 2006, Olorunniwo et al., 2006, Parasuraman et al., 2005). WeChat service quality reflects a WeChat user's overall impression regarding the IM service provided by WeChat. Satisfaction refers to the customer's overall evaluation of a service in terms of whether that service has met the customer's expectations (Lee, Lee, & Feick, 2001). Although service quality and satisfaction have been well documented in the marketing literature (Brady and Cronin, 2001, Lai, 2004, Lee et al., 2001, Luo and Bhattacharya, 2006, Parasuraman et al., 2005, Zhao et al., 2012), little is known about WeChat users' perceived service quality and their satisfaction (Lien & Cao, 2014). Given the current exponential growth of WeChat usage and its dominant role in IM service in the Chinese market, Lien and Cao (2014) call for future research to explore WeChat users' perceived service quality and its influence on users' satisfaction. Stickiness is the ability to attract and retain users and prolong the duration of each stay (Hsu & Liao, 2014). WeChat has stickiness when its users spend more time in using WeChat services to text and communicate with their friends, family members, and others. Yet, very little research to date has examined users' willingness to stick to WeChat, its impact on their continuance intentions of using WeChat services, and its mediating role between satisfaction and usage intentions.
Based on the foregoing discussions, this research aims to fill the gap by examining WeChat users' perceived service quality, satisfaction, and stickiness, and investigating their influence on users' willingness to continue using WeChat services.
This paper is organized as follows: In the next section, we review the literature and develop the hypotheses. We then summarize the research methodology, and report the results. Finally, we conclude with discussions.
Section snippets
Service quality
Gronroos (1984) is a pioneer of research on service quality and the proposed two distinct service dimensions including technical and functional quality. Technical quality refers to how well the core service meets the customers' expectations, while functional quality reflects how the service production and delivery process are perceived (Gronroos, 1984). Instead of being measured in a single-item scale, service quality is measured in multi-dimensional scale due to the fact that the
Research sample
The qualified respondents were selected based on the following three criteria. First, only those WeChat users who sent out at least one message during the last month (monthly active users) were qualified to participate in the survey. Second, this study surveyed residents of Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou representing the four first-tier cities in China. The infrastructure of mobile connection in these four cities is much better than other cities. In addition, 93% of people living in
Sample characteristics
Table 1 shows the demographics of survey respondents. Among the 310 respondents, 52.3% of them were males. Eighty-nine percent of the respondents spent more than 1 h on WeChat daily, and 94.5% of them have used WeChat for more than one year.
Scale validation: the measurement model
The measurement model was tested using AMOS 20 according to the overall model fit, construct reliability, and validity. The outcomes of the model fit indices (χ2/d.f. = 341.962/117 = 2.923; RMSEA = 0.079; RMR = 0.013; CFI = 0.947; AGFI = 0.835; IFI = 0.948;
Discussions
The findings show that environment quality and outcome quality are two important predictors of users' satisfaction which are consistent with Zhao et al., 2012, Kuo et al., 2009, and Dabholkar and Overby (2005). The outcome of the service represents what WeChat users actually get from the service. Given the importance of outcome quality, providing users timely feedback (a user can check the messages on the WeChat system immediately after he/she sends them), offering users with customized
Conclusions and limitations
This study contributes to the literature of instant messaging services by empirically examining the impacts of interaction quality, environment quality, and outcome quality on WeChat users' satisfaction and assessing the effects of WeChat users' satisfaction and stickiness on their usage intention. The results confirm that outcome quality is the dominant driver of WeChat users' satisfaction. Environment quality is found to have a mild effect on users' satisfaction. However, the impact of
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