Factors Influencing Adoption of IoT and Its Impact on CRM in Banks: Examining the Moderating Role of Gender, Age, and Bank Ownership Type

Abstract

Internet is becoming a part of our lifestyle; however, the usage rate and application of the Internet are disparate in different parts of the world. In many emerging countries, the Internet is yet to penetrate ordinary households. The present study focuses on how IoT adoption impacts the banks' customer relationship management (CRM) in an emerging market context. Furthermore, the moderating roles of gender, age, and bank ownership type on the relationship between the adoption of IoT and CRM have also been tested. Cost, convenience, social context, and privacy were studied as the predicting variables of IoT adoption, while IoT adoption was investigated as the antecedent of CRM. The CRM variable has been operationalized as a second-order latent construct consisting of three first-order latent variables: responsiveness, satisfaction, and assurance. A cross-sectional, non-probability-based survey was conducted from 467 bank customers of three public and three private sector banks in Aligarh city of India. Two CFA models were run to ensure reliability, validity, and model fit. Hypotheses were tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) on AMOS software, while PROCESS Macro v4.0 by Hayes (2009) was used to test the moderating effect of gender on the relationship between IoT adoption and CRM. The results indicate that cost, convenience, social context, and privacy are positively influencing IoT adoption, which in turn positively affects CRM. Gender and age were found to have a negative moderation effect on the path between IoT adoption and CRM, while bank ownership type positively moderated this link.