A study of the impacts of website quality on customer relationship performance

Abstract

One of the characteristics of online consumer behaviour is the low cost of searching for alternatives. Therefore, customer loyalty is harder to achieve in the online context than in the offline one. If a website has high information, system and service quality, customers may have greater willingness to maintain, deepen and broaden their relationship with a particular online service provider. This study develops and empirically tests a model examining the relations between website quality, customer satisfaction, customer trust and customer relationship length, depth and breadth with the online financial services. Using survey data from 656 online customers of a Taiwanese securities corporation, results indicate that website quality influences customer satisfaction and trust, except for the link between information quality and customer trust, and customer trust has a stronger impact on relationship depth and breadth than customer satisfaction. Integrating the results, this study concludes that website information quality is the most important factor in enhancing relationship length, while website system quality and service quality contribute a lot to relationship depth and breadth.

Keywords:

• information quality
• system quality
• service quality
• relationship length
• relationship depth
• relationship breadth