Learning in a Disruptive Customer Engagement Platform: An Empirical Analysis in the Banking Industry

Abstract

The shift in enterprise applications to disruptive mobile platforms calls for research to better understand the mechanisms and factors behind success in these new platforms. In this paper, we empirically study the learning dynamics of sales officers and factors associated with business value, measured as account-opening efficiency in a tablet-based banking application at a large private bank in an emerging market. Our model allows us to study individual learning patterns, and our results show that although high performers in the traditional systems continue to maintain their edge in the new mobile platform, the gap between high and low performers is reduced significantly over time. Our results also reveal that customers’ awareness of the tablet banking service, their digital literacy, and external environmental factors such as mobile infrastructure and market maturity can affect sales officers’ account-opening performance in the tablet-based system.