As technologies become more complex and permeate society’s day-to-day cultural interactions, the need grows for practical metrics to assess how the usability of distribution channels, in for example the financial services sector, shapes the customer’s perception of the brands that they deal with. These perceptions can be formed via direct user interaction between the customer and the user interface, or via user interaction with support systems, such as the contact centre, that are in place for staff to communicate with customers. The research presented here presents a justification for turning transactions into relationships, with specific reference to the financial services sector, by proposing practical metrics for usability and the dyadic customer-brand relationship based on empirical investigation. This thesis seeks to bridge the gap between relevant yet disparate disciplines of psychology, marketing and usability engineering. The intention is to investigate how customer perceptions of the brand of a financial services enterprise can be measured and interpreted. The thesis presents, for the first time how the customer-brand relationship can be affected by channel usability and the customer’s perception of the brand based on their interactions with different distribution channels or person-to-person interactions. The contribution to knowledge in this thesis is represented by the formulation of a reliable and valid metric for brand personality assessment. The experiment results included here show how the metric has been successfully designed and implemented with specific relevance to the financial services sector.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:661114 |
| Date | January 2005 |
| Creators | Richardson, Alannah Victoria |
| Publisher | University of Edinburgh |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/1842/14275 |
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