A Socio-Technical Perspective on Social Media Adoption: A case from retail banking

Purpose – While technology continues to make a dramatic and profound impact in service industriesand radically shapes how services are delivered relatively little is understood about the impactof advancing technology on customers; their expectations, perceptions and behaviours. As bankingenters an increasingly digitised world this study reports on the views of 667 e-banking customers withrespect to the perceived potential of social media to add value in retail banking relationships.The purpose of this paper is to propose that in order to realise this opportunity requires the case bankto embrace the second-order level changes required within socio-technical theory (STT) in order thatsuch value can be co-created between the relational parties.Design/methodology/approach – Using the lens of STT to interpret the findings drawn from thecase bank’s e-banking customer base (n¼5,500), it is argued that social media has the potentialto fundamentally change customer-bank relationships and to add value to the way in which the partiesinteract with each other into the future. A survey methodology was adopted.Findings – The findings presented indicate a wide spectrum of customers actively using transactionale-banking solutions in the case bank. The findings showed that those in the 15-30 age group saw“real-time/up-to-date information” as the main gain of their bank being on Facebook while their oldercolleagues in the 31-60 age group had a desire for different returns (“competitions, events”). Thatthe analysis showed that age was the only significant determinant of Facebook appropriateness for thecase bank, and in the context of the age-related preferences outlined above, the issue of segmentation isstrongly highlighted.Originality/value – This study contributes to the academic domain through a rare application ofSTT in a service context, offers implications for practice and highlights important areas for futureresearch, inter alia; the role for new media in banking relationships, the impacts of new media on bankstaff roles, where value now accrues in bank-customer communication, where social media fits inthe promotional mix and relational strategies of banks and what are the issues emerging at thesocial-technical interface between both customers and staff and new technology and media.