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1.1 CASE DESCRIPTION AND PROBLEM STATEMENT

Nasesz Enterprise has been providing home maintenance and domestic electronic repair services since December 2010 in Johor,
Malaysia. The business is offering a wide range of services in a mission to become one-stop home maintenance service provider in Johor by
2025 which include appliances repairs, installations, plumbing, wiring, minor renovations, and handyman services. According to the founder,
the business has served more than 2000 customers and most of them generally contacted Nasesz Enterprise through referrals from their
acquittances such as family and friends. Apart from referrals, the business also acquired several new customers from the internet such as
online classified-ads website via Mudah.my. However, currently, the business is facing low service inquiries which had impacted their
revenue. For instance, the business received at least 15 service enquiries per day in 2019 compared to an average 10 service enquiries per
day in 2020. Moreover, the number of customers from the current online platform is limited. In the past, the business used traditional
marketing approach such as flyer distributions to landed residential areas within Johor Bahru to attract customers, but it resulted in higher
cost and unsatisfied outcome. Alternatively, Nasesz Enterprise focused on leveraging their presence on the internet using social media to
acquire new customers. Facebook and WhatsApp are the primary online marketing tools used by Nasesz Enterprise.

Now, the company has developed a new website with the domain name ‘naseszservice.com’ in a way to enable their customers to
gain more information about their services. The website was integrated with ‘Call-to-action’ (CTA) function that allows customers to make
call to the company in one click. Despite the increasing website traffic on the website, the response on CTA function is not satisfactory as
the incoming service enquiries and the sales conversion rate are still low. According to Russel (2017), CTA method seems to be outdated as
there are many businesses begin adopting new technologies such as Live Chats, WhatsApp Auto Chats, and appointment scheduling services
to provide instant responses to their customers. With the challenges from Covid-19 pandemic, many businesses start to utilize digital services
as a new norm to continue serving their customers (Barnes and Stuart, 2020). Personal care services such as hair salons which rely on walk-
in traffic are now requiring their customers to use online booking system to schedule their appointment (Renfroe, 2021).

Evidently, online booking is effective. Small businesses in United States have experienced up to 120% increase in revenue after
practicing online booking system (Turner, 2021). This implies that small ‘field service’ businesses such as home maintenance and repair
services that typically rely on the word-of-mouth referral strategy have higher possibility to outperform with the utilization of online booking
service on their commercial website. For instance, customer can simply book for the plumber to do the piping works. Although booking a
home maintenance service can be easy and reliable, there are several factors related to the quality of website and e-trust which could influence
the online booking intentions. According to Kaushik and Srinivasa (2017), website quality including the trust factors are key determinants
that affect customer’s purchase intention in the e-commerce. Therefore, this study aimed to i) identify the factors that drive online booking
intention of field service and then ii) proposed online booking strategy to enhance the customer acquisition of Nasesz Enterprise. Further,
the study investigated whether the implemented online booking strategy is effective to increase the customer acquisition of Nasesz Enterprise.

■ 2.0 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 ONLINE BOOKING INTENTION

Online booking refers to the process of making a reservation for a service through the internet using online platforms (Abdullah et
al., 2016). Booking intention refers to the intention to buy or book a service offered by a business which is closely related to purchase
intention (El-Said, 2020). The emergence of online booking has made its predecessor which is traditional booking channels such as physical
counters, call centers, direct calls and walk-ins to become old-fashioned and less favored in the present time even though traditional channels
can lead to higher engagement and more guest conversions (Boto-Garcia, 2021). The traditional booking channels have triggered less
convenience to customers particularly when doing bookings for hotel rooms, dinners, or other available personal services. For instance,
customers make a call to hotel company to make reservation where most of the time they need to go through the dot-com channel. The
waiting times caused by dot-com channels and customer presence in physical service counters are not ideal for customer experience as it
only incurs additional costs to them in term of time and money (Boto-Garcia, 2021). Besides, longer waiting time could lead to frustrations
of customers and reduce the intention to do booking from a service provider (Xu et al., 2021).

The online booking system not only simplifies the booking procedures but also enables both business and customer to gain superior
control over the whole booking process with greater accuracy if compared to manual processing (Mustafa, 2016). According to a report by
Condor Ferries (2018), 72% of online bookings occur withing 48 hours of last-minute Google searches and in average, 148.3 million travel
bookings are conducted online every year. Online booking also expands to other industries such as restaurant industry to serve customers on
appointment basis whereby customer can make reservation for dine-in table in advance using their smartphone (Asli, 2019). This indicates
that the practice of online booking has been widely acceptable by customers around the world.

2.2 WEBSITE QUALITY

A business with sufficient online presence necessarily includes the design and construction of a website that users find convenient
when interacting with a company. A good website quality and appeal can evoke positive feelings and stimulate the cognition or emotions of
a person in regard to a business quality (Fei et al., 2017). Website also can influence the customer beliefs and behavioural intention driven

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