Investigating Consumer Preference in Banking Services - A Conjoint Analysis Study
Investigating Consumer Preference in Banking Services - A Conjoint Analysis Study
Investigating Consumer Preference in Banking Services - A Conjoint Analysis Study
Abstract:
Purpose: This paper attempts to measure the consumer preference of banking services in
Indonesia through the use of a conjoint analysis study. The study is expected to show kinds of
combination of services and features that customers perceive to be important.
Design/methodology/approach: The paper used conjoint analysis to study consumer
preferences towards Indonesian banking services. Twelve unique orthogonal profiles are
generated to enable the preference measurement. The conjoint study design is comprised of
eight attributes that each has two levels. A sample of 655 respondent was collected through
an online survey.
Findings: Convenience of having transactions anywhere and anytime is the most crucial
aspect of customers. That is, online banking facilities and ATM locations were found to
provide the highest utility for customers. Meanwhile, supporting features such as information
or notification is an attribute that customers are willing to trade off.
Practical implications: Practitioners could use the study to find the best service
combinations that they could offer to customers. Practitioners could also know which
attributes customers are willing to make a trade off in comparison to other factor utilities.
Originality/value: Testing customer preference in the banking industry is still relatively
needed in the banking industry. Furthermore, the use of conjoint study is a valuable study
that shows a new perspective of measurement in the service industry.
Acknowledgement: This work is supported by the Research Grant School of Business and
Management ITB 2016.
1
School of Business and Management ITB dimas.maulana@sbm-itb.ac.id
2
School of Business and Management ITB, sudarso_kw@sbm-itb.ac.id
3
School of Business and Management ITB, mustika@sbm-itb.ac.id
Investigating Consumer Preference in Banking Services: A Conjoint Analysis Study
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1. Introduction
The Indonesia banking sector continues to develop after years of expansion and is
mainly stable and well capitalized. According to a survey by Otoritas Jasa Keuangan
(2017), an Indonesian Financial Services Authority, total bank accounts in Indonesia
have increased by about 35% for the last five years. The adoption of financial
products has increased from 1.2 financial products per consumers in 2013 to 1.9
financial products per consumer in 2016. Consumers are increasing their awareness
and understanding of financial products. The bank industry today offers several
products and services to consumers. Digital banking is also better received by
consumers, as the adoption of Internet banking and mobile banking in Indonesia is
growing. Nowadays, consumers are not necessarily required to go to a bank branch
or an ATM to make a transaction, as they can open a bank account with e-banking
features. Nevertheless, conventional delivery channels are still popular with
consumers. It can be seen that consumers have different preferences for various
available banking products or services.
Research on banking services has mainly centred on the development of user profiles
and the exploration of broader economic issues corresponding to consumer demand.
However, the theoretical foundation that investigated how consumers can prefer one
service over another is still limited. Oppewal and Vriens (2000) explained that a
quantitative approach, such as a multiple-item scale in service quality has no well-
defined range between a best and the worst level of the dimension. George and
Kumar (2014) suggested that investigations on how customers perceive performance
based on the actual performance of a product or service are appropriate. Consumers
need to choose the best option by eliciting the best choice for available products and
services. Dhar and Gorlin (2013) described that preferences have an ordering that
implies a definitive preference ranking by consumers between alternatives that
allows them to evaluate whether one alternative is at least as good as the others.
Kaynak et al. (1991) suggested that a study such as conjoint analysis is essential to
investigate how customers make trade-offs among the variety of attributes in the
banking industry.
D. Maulana, S.K. Wiryono, M.S. Purwanegara
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Conjoint analysis is a method used in market research that helps determine how
people value different attributes (feature, function, benefits) for the preference
identification in multi-attribute decision making. Bridges et al. (2011) explained that
conjoint analysis has the advantage to allow researchers control over the
experimental stimuli used to generate the preference data. Accordingly, researchers
can avoid problems of confounding, correlation, insufficient variation, and
unobserved variables standard in the analysis of revealed-preference data. It allows a
more realistic decision model for the population because it forces product/service
evaluation as a whole, which is similar to their actual purchasing situation. This
analysis manifests individual decision models for each subject and allows the
formation of an aggregated decision model across all subjects (Dauda and Lee,
2016).
Even with this background, literature that investigates how consumers make trade-
offs for banking services is still limited. It is difficult to find a study that highlights
the Indonesian banking sector. Krisnanto (2011) showed insights for consumers’
determinant factors for bank selection in Indonesia; however, it does not describe the
empirical motivation on how consumers make choices on various available services
in the market. Thus, the primary objective of this study is to investigate the
preferences of Indonesian consumers on banking services by investigating the
variance of consumers’ behaviour concerning current banking products and service
preferences. The primary research questions addressed in this study are:
1. What are the attributes that affect consumers’ preferences for banking
services?
2. What is the relative importance of these attributes in their overall preference
of banking services?
2. Literature Review
In the first step of the conjoint study, a literature review helped to identify what
factors a consumer considers when evaluating banking services. First, previous
studies show how online banking facilities, such as mobile banking and Internet
banking, have made an impact towards customer adoption for banking services
(Chong et al., 2010; Nasri and Charfeddine, 2012). These delivery channels enable
consumers to complete banking transactions online. Laukkanen (2007) explains that
customers have positive value perceptions of Internet and mobile banking because of
its efficiency, convenience, and safety. Makanyeza (2017) shows that mobile
banking is perceived to be useful and has a relative advantage for consumers.
Accordingly, consumers are expected to prefer banking services with the online
facility. Therefore the research hypothesis is:
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Fourth, waiting time is also postulated to affect consumer preferences towards bank
service. In an early study, Oppewal and Vriens (2000) showed that queuing at
money tellers and counters was not the most preferred attribute in the perceived
service quality. Dauda and Lee (2016) demonstrated that waiting time was found to
be a significant attribute for consumers in banking service quality in Nigeria.
Naturally, consumers are expected to prefer faster banking services to slower
banking service.
Reliability could be perceived as the degree to which measures are free from errors
and, therefore, yield consistent results. This is demonstrated in several studies to
adapt transaction error in order to measure bank reliability (Chavan and Ahmad,
2013). Akhtar (2011) explains that intense customer satisfaction is affected by error-
free banking services. Dauda and Lee (2016) demonstrated that the reliability of
banking could be determined by online transaction error. Accordingly, consumers
are expected to prefer banking services with lower transaction error.
Sixth, consumers are concerned with the operational days and hours in selecting
bank services. Oppewal and Vriens (2000) found that opening hours have a positive
impact on consumer preference. Specifically, consumers prefer banking service that
has weekend banking or Saturday availability. Almossawi (2001) explored this
D. Maulana, S.K. Wiryono, M.S. Purwanegara
191
H6: Banking service with more extended branch working days is more preferred.
Lastly, this study investigates that reward programs in banking could encourage
consumer preference towards choosing a banking service. In an early study, Ülengin
(1998) found that the loyalty program that covers all the transactions of a customer
was the most crucial attribute in bank selection decisions. Customers feel that
rewards from the transactions they have made are essential to encourage them in
selecting a bank service. Keh and Lee (2006) explain that reward programs enhance
loyalty and can enhance the value proposition instead of merely on repeat purchases.
Accordingly, consumers are expected to prefer banking services with a more
beneficial reward program.
H8: Banking service that covers all products and services is more preferred.
3. Research Methodology
The dimension of bank service is often unclear to the consumer because service
characteristics are intangible and may be perceived differently. Conjoint analysis can
provide a better realistic decision for consumers because they are forced to evaluate
the set of alternatives as a whole, which is similar in real life. The design of this
Investigating Consumer Preference in Banking Services: A Conjoint Analysis Study
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study uses full profile conjoint analysis to measure consumer preferences towards
the banking service. The procedure of data collection and analysis is a literature
review, survey design, pilot experiment, data collection, and data analysis. This
study employed an online survey as the data collection tool. A literature review
helped to identify eight attributes that consumer considers while evaluating banking
services. This conjoint analysis design is comprised of eight attributes, each of
which has two levels of attributes. Table 1 shows the attributes and attribute levels
used in the study.
In full profile conjoint analysis, the number of profiles might be too many to conduct
for respondents to evaluate. The number of profiles in this study can reach to 28
factorials of banking services, which equals to 256 profiles. Previous studies
(Ulengin, 1998; Rao, 2014) suggest the use of orthogonal design to reduce total
profiles. According to Rao (2014), the orthogonal design is efficient and enables
estimation of all main effects of the attributes. This study employed SPSS software
to help design choice sets orthogonally. Twelve profiles are generated from the
software. Respondents are asked to rank 12 banking profiles from best (1) to worst
(12) according to their preference. All 12 profiles and response fields are placed on
one-page survey design.
4. Results
This study collected 655 respondents. Table 2 shows the profile of the respondents
in the study. The age of the respondents was comprised of 54% aged 18-35 and 46%
aged 36 and older, undergraduate and master education respondents combine to
65%, and 47% are male. All respondents need to have a banking account to be
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eligible to fill out the questionnaire. In the data, 235 respondents had one bank
account, 163 had two bank accounts, and 257 respondents had more than two bank
accounts. This means that 64% of the respondents had at least two bank accounts in
their arrangement.
Table 3 shows Pearson’s R and Kendall’s Tau coefficients, which illustrated the
correlation between the design and received the sample data. A significance value of
Pearson’s R and Kendall’s Tau indicates the proportion of the expected preference
explained by the actual preference. High coefficients of both indicators show that the
measurements for the investigated profiles are assimilated to the cumulative model
of the analysis. According to the results, the conjoint model was statistically
significant (Pearson’s R= 0.924, p < 0.001 and Kendall's Tau= 0.725, p ≤ 0.01).
This means that values generated from the data analysis were significantly different.
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Table 4 also shows the utility estimate of the study. This study used a ranking
approach in the data collection with one (1) as the best profile and twelve (12) as the
worst profile. Hence, banking facilities that had an online facility with mobile and
internet banking with a 0.163 utility estimate means the highest preferred attribute
for consumers. On the other hand, a bank that did not have an online facility was not
preferred by consumers. This finding suggests that H1 was supported. These
findings could imply in the respondents’ profile, where 80% of the respondents were
using online facilities, and 97% were using ATMs. Accessibility and convenience
were the essential attributes in consumer preferences. The finding showed that
consumers were emphasizing the distribution channel of the facility as an essential
preference factor.
Consumers were found to favour faster banking services since they preferred to wait
less time during a transaction. The attribute level that was preferred by consumers
were transaction waiting times that were under 10 minutes with a utility estimate of
0.099. The findings indicate that geographical location and time convenience were
important for consumers. Besides convenience, consumers also preferred a more
beneficial reward program. The finding shows that a reward program that covered
all products and services had a utility of 0.175, which implies a more preferred
attribute. This finding shows that H4 and H8 were supported. Several findings in this
study were empirically different from previous studies. First, although several
studies mention that consumers prefer a network that is closer to home (Devlin and
Gerrard, 2005; Honka et al., 2017), this study found otherwise. Bank location was
shown to have a -0.030 utility estimate for a location near the home. This means that
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consumers preferred a bank that was located near their office rather than their home,
which had a 0.030 utility estimate. The fact that a location closer to the workplace
was more preferred is supported by the fact that consumers also preferred a bank
branch that was open Monday to Friday. This finding suggests that H2 and H6 were
not supported. This finding also suggests that consumers preferred to complete their
banking transactions within their working hours. Moreover, this study suggests that
consumers feel automatic notification was unfavourable with -0.023 utility estimate.
Thereby, H7 was not supported.
This study found that consumers preferred an ATM location that was only located in
bank branches instead of other places. This finding suggests that consumers may
perceive ATMs outside of bank branches as uncertain and risky. Min and
Melachrinoudis (2001) found that consumers avoid making banking transactions at
the locations that were perceived to be uncertain and risky. However, this study also
found that higher transaction errors were found to have a higher utility. Customers
chose to have a bank service with a 3% transaction error. It is suspected that a
spurious loyalty occurred in this preference. Consumers treat a specific bank poorly
because of familiarity or habit, inertia, passivity, or lack of other alternatives, but
they do not have a corresponding positive relative attitude (Filip and Anghel, 2009).
The evidence found in the study shows that online facilities and ATM location have
the highest utility for consumer preference. This implies that consumers perceive
geographical and time convenience as the most crucial attribute in their preference.
Hence, it is expected that consumers prefer banks that provide online facility since it
enables them to complete banking transaction wirelessly. Although ATM locations
in several places may provide better accessibility, this study suggests that consumers
perceive ATMs located outside bank branches to be less secure. Thereby, consumers
prefer to make a banking transaction that is convenient and safe for them.
Further findings suggest that consumers prefer to have bank service that has less
waiting time and acknowledge all transactions in reward programs. Wang and Ching
(2016) demonstrate that consumers value the proximity of a branch’s location to
both home and workplace almost equally; however, this study suggests that
consumers prefer a location that is closer to their workplace. Higher utility on
Monday to Friday banking implies that consumers prefer to make banking
transactions during their office hours, supporting their preference for branches close
to their workplace. Some findings are compelling enough to be investigated further.
The finding shows that consumers prefer bank services with 3% transaction error,
which imply that a spurious loyalty occurs in the preferences. Finally, this study
suggests that consumers do not prefer automatic bank notification. Consumers may
feel uncomfortable being flooded by transaction notifications so that they prefer to
find the information independently. This finding implies that automatic notification
can be perceived as a spam message.
Investigating Consumer Preference in Banking Services: A Conjoint Analysis Study
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From the practical viewpoint, managers can make use of this study by considering
the utility level and relative importance in the findings. Salim et al. (2018) explained
that service quality does not directly affect customer loyalty. Instead, it needs
mediation from customer satisfaction. Practitioners could devise the best service
combination that can be designated to yield the highest utility. This study suggests
that consumers prefer banks with electronic banking facilities and ATM locations,
implying that accessibility and convenience are essential to consumer preference.
Commercial or workplace areas could be highlighted since consumers prefer to
make banking transactions during weekdays and closer to their office. Banks also
need to provide quick and efficient service, as longer waiting times are not
favourable. Consumers could tolerate a small amount of transaction error, but they
prefer a reward program that covers all their transactions. Lastly, managers could
consider allowing consumers to access notifications or information quickly and
possibly a customized notification that allows them to manage their preferred
notification, given that consumers do not prefer automatic notifications.
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