Assessing the Quality of a Decision Support E-Service

Introduction

Assessing the quality of traditional services has been an active research area for over twenty years (Parasuraman & Zeithaml, 2002). The introduction of the SERVQUAL survey instrument in 1988 was a key development in service quality assessment, as the instrument has served as a focal point for service quality research and has stimulated the development of alternative instruments (Parasuraman et al., 1988). More recently, researchers have turned their focus to measuring the quality of Internet-mediated services, or “e-services.” Most of these studies have focused on the perceived quality of service of e-commerce retailers that provided transaction services for the customer through a Web interface and delivered a physical good (e.g., books) or service (e.g., air travel) to the customer following a purchase transaction. E-S-QUAL, developed by some of the original creators of SERVQUAL, is an example of such an instrument (Parasuraman et al., 2005). More recent examples of instruments include PeSQ (Cristobal et al., 2007), WebQual (Loiacono et al., 2007), and e-SELFQUAL (Ding et al., 2011).

While early e-service quality assessment research has focused on retail e-commerce, it is also important to consider other e-service environments. Belanger et al., (2006) proposed a goal-based taxonomy for Web sites which identified eleven different Web site types. A list of these eleven goal-based types is given in the leftmost column of Table 1; readers are referred to the original paper of Belanger et al., (2006) for precise definitions of each type. As shown in the rightmost column of Table 1, the current authors contend that these eleven types can be grouped into five categories based upon Web site focus: transaction processing, decision support, knowledge acquisition, online community, and entertainment. Retail e-commerce is represented by a single goal type within the category of transaction processing. The other ten Web site goal types shown in the first column of the table differ from e-commerce in that they are associated with what Parasuraman et al., (2005) referred to as “pure service” Web sites, i.e., Web sites that are not oriented towards the delivery of a physical product. In this paper we shall refer to these “pure service” Web sites as pure e-service Web sites.