Source and Channel Choices in Business-to-Government Service Interactions: A Vignette Study

To deal with tax matters, businesses have various potential sources (e.g., Tax Office, advisor, industry organization, friends/family) in their environment. Those sources can be coupled with an increasingly wide variety of channels (e.g., telephone, face-to-face, website, e-mail) through which information can be obtained. This has led to an increasingly complex information flow between governments and businesses. This paper provides new directions for public service delivery strategies by studying both source and channel choices of businesses using the vignette method. The findings indicate that source and channel choices are determined in different ways (i.e., positive or negative) by different factors. Furthermore, we found that source and channel choices are interrelated. It is concluded that that sources and channels fulfil different roles for information seekers. It is advisable for government to anticipate these roles in the design of their service delivery strategies.