Watch While Being Watched: How Can ICT Providers Leverage Net Promoter Score to Understand and Predict Sustained User Adoption?

Purpose Enterprise collaboration technologies have been recognized for enabling effective digital collaboration among employee and overcoming temporal and spatial barriers. However, organization-wide adoption of these types of new technologies remains an operational challenge to generating business value. Thus, organizations use interventions, such as change management programs, to support systems implementations. Prior literature on social networks has shown that interactions among interdependent employees influence technology adoption and use. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of a service provider’s change management program on end users’ subsequent advocacy to others in their network, as well to understand the complex downstream effects of advocacy on current usage, continued usage, and intention to recommend. This research recognizes the critical role of peer recommendation in network good adoption and positions net promoter score as a key predictor of sustained system use.Methodology/approach This study adopts a quantitative approach using various regression analysis based on survey data. Data for the study was collected from 587 employees, as part of a change management project supporting a large-scale customer digital transformation, regarding their perceptions of the change and experience with the new enterprise collaboration technology.Findings The results of the research highlight the role of specific dimensions related to change management in explaining subsequent advocacy outcomes. According to the data, the change management process positively impacts end users’ subsequent likelihood to recommend a new digital collaboration technology to peers in their organization. The empirical research demonstrated that higher advocacy of a new enterprise collaboration technology within one’s network significantly predicts one’s current use, which in turn impacts one’s intention to continue using the technology, and this sequential pathway ultimately influences one’s likelihood to recommend the technology to others in the network. Further, the effect of current use on one’s likelihood to recommend is mediated via future intentions to use.Contribution This research bridges knowledge on technology adoption, change management, and individual level of advocacy by examining the role of peer recommendation in adoption of enterprise collaboration technologies. While the net promoter score has been widely used in consumer behavior research focused on consumer goods industries, studies have yet to examine how the measure might be implemented as a key indicator of network good adoption at the individual enterprise level, by measuring the employee-level net promoter scores within a client-organization.