Antecedents of the SFA System Usage: An Extension and Application of Technology Acceptance Model

• Main Authors: JaoChing-Yi, 饒靜宜
• Other Authors: Song Chen
• Format: Others
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/20964095275089323884

碩士 === 崑山科技大學 === 企業管理研究所 === 95 === Nowadays the market becomes intensively competitive. In order to maintain competitive advantage, academics and enterprise all emphasize the importance of relational marketing. At the same time, many companies implement sales force automation (SFA) as an integral part for the enhancement of the personnel productivity and effectively to manage the customer relational. As the old saying goes “No Pain, no gain”, launching the SFA system cost a huge spending. Therefore, the individual company must spend a lot of time and money on it. But mostly the SFA is easily caused a higher failure up to 80 %. Since SFA execution has potential producing high returns carry high risk and at the same time, the acceptance and adoption for Salesmen toward using SFA is one of the key factors to affect the success in launch SFA. Therefore, in recent years, the issue “How to encourage salespeople – to them accept and full use in SFA system” has received higher attention in academia. This study, based on and extended technology acceptance model (TAM), explores the influence of external variables (including organizational support, social influence, and personal characteristics) on the salespeople’s adoption process of SFA system. Two hundreds and eighty-five financial consultants from one life insurance company in sonthern Taiwan were sampled as subjects. The results of confirmatory factor analysis indicate that this questionnaire has good model fit, reliability and validity. The SEM path analysis shows that respondes perceive usefulness, ease of use, and the consciousness of threats all have direct influence on usage of the SFA system. Also, the perceived ease of use has indirectly influence usage of SFA system through the perceived usefulness. The findings also show that the external variables, user’s training and peers’ usage have the most influence toward perceived beliefs and the usage of SFA system. Finally, this study provides suggestions and recommendation for business authorities, human resources department, and future researches.