A Technology Readiness-Based Taxonomy of Customers

Abstract

Although the service management field has developed and put forward new concepts, we have historically done a less effective job validating these concepts after their introduction. Given this issue, this study attempts to test and extend Parasuraman and Colby’s (2001) taxonomy of technology readiness. Their taxonomy (originally developed based on a U.S. sample) was replicated with a U.K. sample. This study’s replication partially supports their taxonomy of five types of customers based on their technology beliefs. The author found support for the existence of four of the five original clusters (explorers, pioneers, skeptics , andlaggards ) but found no evidence of the existence of a fifth segment named paranoids . The author also identifies the themes that underlie the formation of the taxonomy, namely, technophobia and technological positivism. Finally, for each cluster, the relationships between technology readiness, demographics, current use, and future adoption of technology-based services are explored and compared.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 209 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.