Seminar, Improving Customer-Information Technology-Company Communications in e-Commerce

Improving Customer-Information Technology-Company Communications in e-Commerce

Izak Benbasat, Sauder School of Business University of British Columbia

This presentation will provide an overview and findings from a series of research projects conducted during the last decade, with my colleagues and graduate students for understanding how to make electronic commerce more productive and enjoyable for customers via the use of information technology (IT) support.
Given that a web site is a company’s “window to the world”, customers interact directly with a number of information technology artifacts provided by the company (such as, product recommendation agents, video product presentations) as well as entities within that company (such as, sales assistants) and other customers (collaborative shopping) via information technology mediated channels. This interaction is designed to enhance customers’ efficiency, effectiveness and shopping enjoyment by providing high quality information technology-based services with the aim of improving customers’ trust in online merchants, reducing their perceived risks of buying on the web, and increasing their loyalty to web merchants and commitment to online shopping.
We have conducted over 20 studies* using laboratory experimentation and field survey methods.  The topics studied included: how to improve product understanding on the web; how to provide services to customers via IT support; improving customers’ purchase quality via recommendation agent use, designing product recommendations agents that are trustworthy, and designing social interfaces to such agents; collaborative shopping; and reducing risk and deception in electronic commerce. The talk will provide a brief summary of these studies, describe how they constitute an overall research plan to investigate customer-company communications in electronic commerce, and the findings of these studies that will enhance the practical design of electronic commerce interfaces in order to improve the online shopping experiences of customers.