D11.3: Economic aspects of mobility and identity

Title: MECHANISMS FOR BUILDING USER TRUST

Among the many influencing factors for the usage of MIdM technologies, trust and the building of trust relationships between the different stakeholders, such as customers or service providers, can be seen as one of the most important and essential constructs. According to Boon and Holmes, trust can be defined as: 

“Trust: A state involving confident positive expectations about another’s motives with respect to oneself in situations entailing risk”

Looking at this definition, three general characteristics of trust are highlighted: 

1. A trust relationship involves two parties, namely the trustor and the trustee.

2. Trust involves uncertainty and risk. 

3. The trustor has faith in the trustee’s honesty and believes the trustee will not betray him. 

While it is possible to identify the characteristics and the players for trust, the process of trust building towards a service or a product is important as well. One of the models to explain this process is described by Fung and Lee. Their model analyses trust building with regard to the market for mobile commerce applications (cf. ). In the opinion of the authors, this model can also be applied and extended to the domain of mobility and identity and mobile identity management. As initially stated, this is due to the fact that trust is necessary to attract users to adopt a new technology or a service. Moreover, the scope of this model can be broadened to general organisations, as not only commercial companies can offer MIdM facilities in their services and products (cp. Chapter ).

According to Siau and Shen getting a potential customer to start a transaction with a service provider is the key step for initiating the trust development life cycle (cf. ). In order to do this, there are various ways, such as:

1. Through reward attraction, or  

2. By demonstrating features such as  

   1. convenience,  

   2. cost efficiency, and  

   3. personal necessity 

Besides the general concept of trust and the trust building life cycle, the general components of customer trust need to be taken into consideration. According to Siau and Shen, the technology and the service provider are the key components, since they are considered to have the biggest impact on the customer trust. Besides these 2 factors, reliability and security of mobile technology are equally important, since failures in the early stages of the usage of M-Commerce reduce the customers’ trust significantly. Moreover, as mobile technology evolves, the trust focus shifts from technology to the mobile service provider.  

From a service provider’s perspective, there are several steps, which need to be taken into consideration to build an initial trust formation. Among other factors, this includes the dissemination of relevant information or the cultivation of interest. Other specific ways for organisations include the following steps: 

1. Enhance customer familiarity, as people tend to trust the familiar, e.g. by general publicity or advertisements.

2. Build vendor reputation, as a good reputation suggests certainty and less risk in conducting business.

3. Deliver high-quality information, as the information posted on a company has a high impact on the customers’ perception.

4. Elicit third-party recognition and certification, as the independent nature of third-party certification helps customers to feel more secure in doing business with the M-Commerce provider.

5. Provide attractive rewards, such as free trials or gift cards helping to attract new customers.

It is important to maintain a trust relationship, as creating trust is time-consuming and trust can easily be destroyed. Accordingly, there are several successful methods derived from E-Commerce that can be adopted by organisations offering mobile services bundled with IdM functionality to overcome trust barriers. This includes the following suggestions that can be pursued by organisations to successfully overcome trust barriers: 

1. Improve site quality: User-friendly design of web-sites accessed by mobile devices (e.g. giving customers sufficient information for purchases) helps to convey the vendor’s competence.

2. Sharpen business competence: Refers to the skills, technical knowledge, and expertise in operating M-Commerce applications.

3. Maintain company integrity: Providers need to be congruent with regard to the actions and the promises given to their customers.

4. Post privacy policy: Similar to E-Commerce providers, M-Commerce providers should post their privacy policy online, so customers are informed about the information being processed. This helps to build transparency.

5. Strengthen security controls: In order to have secure M-Commerce transactions, technologies need to be in place that help to allow Multilateral Security for all involved parties.

6. Foster a Virtual Community: By building virtual communities, mobile service providers can replicate the success of web-based online communities and create positive evaluations by their users.

7. Encourage communication and increase accessibility: In order to build synergies, the users should be brought into close communication with the M-Commerce provider, reducing information asymmetries and fostering the provider’s credibility and trustworthiness.

8. Use external auditing to monitor operations: External auditing helps to maintain the customers’ trust by keeping the provider to behave fair and legally.

summarises the activities for initial trust building and the continuous trust development for service providers and mobile technologies into a trust building framework.

Figure : Derived trust building framework