Banking with Personalized Touch: An Examination of the Impacts of Types of Customization on Users' Commitment

A belief that customization is an indispensable element for viable e-commerce websites is widely accepted as a truth in the business industry. However, some critical questions have been overlooked: does exposure to website customization induce users' commitment to the website more than does its absence? Do certain types of website customizations produce a good effect in enhancing relational bonds with the websites while others are detrimental? The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impacts of types of customization on commitment toward the website. Building on conceptual framework of types of processing, remembering, comprehension and association were identified as types of customization. An experiment with pretest-post test control group (N = 100) was designed to assess the impacts of these three types of customization on commitment.

The results indicated that the presence of customization, in general, significantly induce positive affective, calculative commitment and higher tendency to stay with the website than that without any customization. In respect of the types of customization, comprehension and association types were significantly elicited positive affective commitment. Association type was the only type of customization evoked positive calculative commitment. Remembering type was found insignificant on all dependent measures as compared with absence of customization. Implications of the findings are discussed.