Measuring the Quality Of E-Business Services

Background

Much of the work regarding electronic service quality is directly or indirectly grounded in earlier research regarding traditional, or non-electronic, service quality. As summarized by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1985), service quality differs significantly from physical goods quality due to the intangible, heterogeneous, and inseparable nature of services This led Parasuraman et al. (1985) to conclude that service quality was more difficult for consumers to evaluate than goods quality; that consumer quality assessment depends on a comparison of prior expectations with perceived service performance; and that the process of service delivery as well as the outcome of the service were both vital in the customer’s evaluation of quality.

Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1988) subsequently developed SERVQUAL, a service quality model and assessment tool designed to incorporate these differences. SERVQUAL assessed service quality along five dimensions via a forty-four question customer survey. A key element of the original SERVQUAL was the “gap model” of service quality, defining service quality as the difference between a customer’s expectations of service and her actual service experience. The forty-four questions of the survey consisted of twenty-two paired questions; the first question in the pair asks the customer to rate her expectation of some aspect of the service, and the second question asks the customer to assess her actual experience with that aspect. The five service quality dimensions the authors derived were service tangibles (e.g., the appearance of the service facility), reliability (e.g. consistency of the service), responsiveness (e.g. promptness of reply to customer needs), assurance (e.g. trustworthiness of the servers), and empathy (e.g., apparent personal concern for the customers).

After its introduction, SERVQUAL was applied to a wide range of traditional services including retail businesses (Teas, 1993), support services (Pitt, Watson, & Kavan, 1995), and health care applications (Babakus & Mangold, 1992). Several authors, however, questioned the utility of the gap model in assessing service quality (e.g., Asubonteng, McCleary & Swan, 1996; Babakus & Boller, 1992). As an alternative, Cronin and Taylor (1992) introduced SERVPERF, which directly measured the service quality perceived by the customer in lieu of assessing the gap between expectation and experience. The survey items used in the SERVPERF model are largely based on the survey items in SERVQUAL, suggesting some consensus regarding the critical aspects of traditional service quality.

Both SERVQUAL and SERVPERF remain well-used measures of traditional service quality (Carrillat, Jaramillo, & Mulki, 2007). Virtually all models and assessment tools for e-service quality have adopted the direct measurement approach of SERVPERF rather than the gap theory approach of SERVQUAL.