Benefits sought by citizens and channel attitudes for multichannel payment services: Evidence from Italy

•The study develops and tests a framework of sought benefits by citizens when approaching multichannel payment services.•The framework is the basis for a segmentation of Italian citizens' approach to multichannel payment services.•We provide implications for policy makers for favoring the diffusion of multichannel payment services.•Our study suggests possible ways for turning multichannel service provision into a booster of e-Government diffusion.

Together with the digitalization of government services, a considerable amount of countries, and Italy in particular among them, are considering the introduction of several online and offline access point to its services in order to increase the penetration of provision systems not requiring an interaction at the PA office. This study, through a two-step empirical exercise run in Italy, intends to understand the benefits sought by citizens and the channel attitudes in order to understand whether and how this orientation by policy makers, with respect to payment services, may be effective. Thanks to a suited sampling, the study sets the basis for a segmentation of the citizens in terms of benefits sought and discusses the channel attitudes within each segment identified. By analyzing the characteristics of the segments, the study presents implications for policy makers and public servants and provides a conceptual background for grounding further research on multichannel service provision.