مدل معادلات ساختاری برای مدیریت ارتباط با مشتری (CRM) موثر در صنعت با محتوای دیجیتالی

Digital contents industry has been expanding its business based on broadband internet technology. But service level of contents provider has not reached the expected level of customers in the context of CRM yet. In this paper, we develop a structural equation model for customer satisfaction index (CSI) to measure the level of digital contents service quality reflecting the aspects of contents quality, service quality and provider quality. Our proposed model is applied to various types of contents such as on-line games, mobile contents, internet VOD services and e-music. The results give us the controllable feedback information to effectively improve customer satisfaction for each kind of digital content industry.

As the knowledge and information integrated society comes to arrive, digital contents industry is regarded as a novel knowledge-integrated industry geared up with hi-tech industry and creative idea. Recently the digital contents service industry has grown rapidly in the form of on-line game, mobile contents, e-book, e-learning, internet broadcasting, and e-music. This is mainly due to the advancement in infrastructure of information system and the development of internet. Along with the birth of new technology, such as a ubiquitous network environment and an intelligent handheld device, the market of wired internet contents is expanding to the market of wireless internet contents. Its market size is expected to grow from 0.48 billion dollars in year 2001 to 1.45 billion dollars in year 2002, and in year 2003 it is expected to be 2.33 billion dollars, which is raised by more than 70%. In Korea, with the objective of becoming one of the five major digital content countries, the government encourages the development of digital content production technology. Key research that took place in the digital contents field in 2004 includes digital technology designed to support high-quality digital video production, game engines which are compatible with both PC and PS2, and DRM-related technology that aims to protect digital contents and IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights) (MIC, 2005). Although the digital contents industry is expected to show high potential of growth due to the rapid growth in mobile industry, the market has its own problems of low re-purchasing rate for the digital contents according to the study of Korea Information Strategy Development Institute (2000). This is mainly resulted from the extremely low satisfaction of such contents. In the context of CRM (customer relationship management), the improvement of customer satisfaction is crucial. There would be various factors affecting the customer satisfaction of digital contents. Those factors would include the various aspects, such as digital content’s quality itself, the quality of service and the quality of contents provider. Therefore it is hard to increase the customer satisfaction just by improving one factor. In addition, satisfaction level would vary depending on the types of contents, such as on-line games, mobile contents, internet VOD services and e-music. If one can find the causal relationship among various factors and can compare the level of customer satisfaction over different types of contents, the digital contents industry can establish more effective and contents specific marketing plans for CRM by setting the priority on more influential factors. For this purpose, we propose a structural equation model (SEM) that is designed to figure out both direct and indirect effects of the casual relationship between the factors and customer satisfaction with respect to content type. Additionally, we obtain the customer satisfaction index (CSI) similar to ACSI (American CSI) concept (Fornell, Johnson, Anderson, Cha, & Bryant, 1996). We expect that our proposed model will bring meaningful results by presenting the feedback information, which would be utilized to increase the customer’s satisfaction and the re-purchasing rate. This paper is organized as follows. In Section 2, we review related literature. In Section 3, we propose a structural equation model for the customer satisfaction index for digital content industry. In Section 4, empirical data analysis is performed. Finally, in Section 5, we discuss the results of our study and suggest the direction for future research.

In this study, we analyzed the structural relations among content quality, service quality, and provider quality in digital contents using SEM. In formulation of an SEM, we considered the usefulness and efficiency as two latent factors for content quality. Additionally, service stability and responsiveness were used for the service quality, and the provider reliability was adopted for the latent factors for the provider quality, respectively. As a result of the fitting SEM, we found out that the content efficiency, service responsiveness, and service stability are important factors in relation to customer’s satisfaction. The result also suggested that although the reliability of supplier would not affect customer’s satisfaction directly but it has indirect effect. We, therefore, can conclude that the contents suppliers should pay more attention to improving the content and service quality, while keeping their high reliability for their customers. Comparing the satisfaction index for each type of content with another, we observed that the level of satisfaction for the VOD service is lower than that of both game and music. We observed that causes of dissatisfaction in the VOD service are different with respect to transmission channels: in the wired internet the stability and responsiveness were low, while the content usefulness was evaluated as low in the wireless internet. In the case of online game, wireless internet provided lower CSIs unlike e-music and VOD services. We have also shown different patterns in measurement variables in relation to CSIs of different gender and age groups. We believe that companies will be able to gather valuable information from our study results to improve the current managerial situation. Limitation of our study lies in analyzing relatively small data and in considering the few categories of products of digital contents. They are left further study areas.