Six Sigma Approach to Improve Quality in E-Services: An Empirical Study in Jordan

Introduction

The changes in the global environment in using Internet and the World Wide Web for various day-to-day operations have led to many organisations venturing into electronic services (e-services) as they believe it would help them to stay competitive among firms and to cater towards the growing expectations of its customers. There are benefits for both individuals and organisations (Batagan, Pocovnicu, & Capisizu, 2009). Many developed countries have successfully embarked on e-services as a means of convenience and customer reach to their community and people. However, in developing countries, nearly 85% of e-government projects have either totally failed (e-government projects were either not implemented or implemented but immediately abandoned) or partially failed (major goals were not attained and/or there were undesirable outcomes) (Holmes, 2001; Heeks, 2003; Dada, 2006). The major problem behind e-government project failure in developing countries is the gap between the e-service design and the reality, which embraces a variety of factors including information, technology, process objectives and values, staffing and skills, management systems and structures, and more importantly meeting customer expectation (Heeks, 2003; Kumar & Best, 2006; Udo, Bagchi, & Kirs, 2010). Hence, the main objective of this research paper is to address this problem by investigating the application of Six Sigma approach to improve quality in e-services

In any firm, the quality of the e-service is the main feature that distinguishes one from another, and in achieving a competitive advantage (Batagan, Pocovnicu, & Capisizu, 2009; Miller, 2010). Hence, firms try to apply the quality e-service commensurate with the needs and desires of customers, and to reduce the gaps between the visions of top management and the actual quality service based on the perspective of the users of this service. We could relate reducing this gap to reducing defects or trying to achieve zero errors, which is the doctrine of Six Sigma approach (Pyzdek, 2001).

The Six Sigma was originally developed for manufacturing processes by Motorola in late 1980s, but today service firms and service functions within almost every sector are using Six Sigma to improve profits and performance (Antony, 2002). However, unlike products, services are based on information flows that are not easily measured, tested or controlled for quality. Hence assessing service quality continues to be a challenging topic. There are various perspectives to service quality and the information flows that exist in manufacturing organizations are quite different to the information generated by services (Abdolshah & Yusuff, 2008). These complexities have allowed very little work in applying Six Sigma to a limited number of services. This forms the basic motivation of our study and our objective is to investigate the application of Six Sigma in e-services, especially in a developing country as their e-service success rates are quite low.