Online service quality: Content and process of analysis

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to build a comprehensive model of online service quality that confirms both the content of, and process of measuring, this higher-order construct. While the past decade has seen the Internet become a key channel for service delivery, there remains uncertainty around many aspects of both the content of, and process of how to measure, online service quality. We use a large sample of European consumers (n = 3399) of four companies (two pure play and two multichannel) to develop a new nine-dimension model of online service quality. We validate importance as a disconfirmation standard. We find trust in the company to be the most important dimension of online service quality, with customer service also highly rated. Issues of personalisation/customisation were very low rated. We find the online pure-play companies in the sample delivering better performance than multichannel retailers, despite having customers who are actually more demanding. We discuss the practical and research implications of these findings.

Keywords:

• e-commerce
• service quality
• retail

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Niall Piercy

Niall Piercy is Professor of Entrepreneurship and Head of the Operations Management and Entrepreneurship Department at the School of Management, Swansea University, UK. His research is focused around systems-orientated approaches to the delivery of customer value. This includes the capture of customer intelligence at the front end of the organisation, mechanisms by which this intelligence is transferred through the business from marketing to operational areas, and operational approaches used to design fulfilment mechanisms.