Individual, social, organisational and system factors that influence acceptance of SFA tools: the case study of CRM in a South African banking context

Abstract

This research study investigated the key factors that facilitate the adoption of technology by salespeople by building on previous studies in literature that have investigated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) acceptance. The research model was adapted by introducing a new construct, System Characteristics, along with Organisational, Social and Individual Factors to explain Sales Force Automation (SFA) tool acceptance, through the mediating influences of Perceived Usefulness (PU) and Perceived Ease-of-Use (PEOU). The results from 337 end-users of the Siebel CRM system in Bank A, in South Africa, found that in addition to PU and PEOU, Personal Innovativeness and Team Leader Support are significant independent drivers of User Acceptance of SFA tools. The model had an R2 of 0.480, which showed that a considerable portion of the variance could be explained through these factors. The research contributes to the current body of research by confirming the importance of personal innovativeness and team leader support towards system acceptance. The number of years the user has been working on the system was also shown to have a significant positive influence on acceptance. Practitioners, concerned with the acceptance of SFA tools, will find that organisational and social factors can significantly influence how users perceive a system to be easy-to-use and useful. The fact that these factors are all relatively easily implementable will be welcomed by IT practitioners facing similar challenges with their sales force. Technical characteristics of the system were found to be a construct that is recommended for future research, based on the findings from this study. Identifying specific aspects of the interface that change users’ perceptions about the software’s ease-of-use can be done by possibly Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) with the e-S-QUAL model in future studies.