Mobile Application and Customer Effort: A Multigroup Analysis Among Energy Customers in Malaysia

This study examines the impact of mobile applications (mobile apps) on customer effort across two main customer categories (residential and business) of a prominent energy provider in Malaysia. A questionnaire survey was administered to 951 respondents selected via stratified sampling, and Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM), SmartPLS 4.0, was employed to analyse the data using bootstrapping and multigroup analysis. The results indicate that customer effort was influenced by functionality and design quality. Conversely, social trust and information quality negatively impacted customer effort in both customer categories. The multigroup analysis revealed no substantial variances among all variables on customer effort. These findings can assist energy companies in standardising their mobile app services across various customer segments, thus improving customer experience and satisfaction. Future research can expand the study by including other industries for better generalisability of the findings.