Discussion Implications

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Discussion & Implications

Implications for Practice

Practitioners can use the proposed EC-SERVQUAL (see Figure 1) to assess customer perceptions of service quality of web sites that provide digital products and services. It is difficult to identify any web site that offers no services whatsoever. Competing digital product providers (e.g., video-on-demand providers) may sell many identical products and service quality is a primary means of competitive differentiation. Digital service providers that sell only services (e.g., online banking) have little to offer if their service is poor. As the concise EC-SERVQUAL instrument is periodically administered to a representative set of customers, digital product providers can use this instrument to better understand their customers' perceptions of service quality and take necessary corrective actions to improve them.

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Figure 1: The EC-Adapted SERVQUAL Instrument

Besides an overall assessment, the EC-SERVQUAL instrument can be used to compare customers' perceptions of specific factors (i.e., reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy) among web sites. This instrument has been designed to be applicable across a broad spectrum of digital products providers, and to offer a common framework for comparative analysis.

Implications for Research

The study represents an important progress in the development of valid and reliable measures of e-commerce service quality. Researchers should recognize the need to investigate the causal relationship between e-commerce service quality and other constructs forming the boundary of B2C e-commerce effectiveness, such as customer satisfaction, repurchase behavior, and system usage. Parasuraman & Grewal (2000) also proposed a research agenda regarding the quality-value-loyalty chain. Future research efforts could develop and test hypotheses relating to e-commerce service quality in the digital marketing context. The multiple-item EC-SERVQUAL instrument with good reliability and validity will be essential to the development and testing of e-business theories, and provide researchers with a basis for explaining, justifying, and comparing difference among results.

Limitations

Through the rigorous validation of the instrument, a general instrument for measuring customer perceptions of web site service quality was refined. Nevertheless, there are three limitations in our work that could be addressed in future studies.

First, while we developed the instrument using the sample gathered in Taiwan in the tri-state Chinese region, a cross-cultural validation using another large sample gathered elsewhere is required for greater generalization of this proposed instrument. That is, other samples from different areas in culture or different nations should be gathered to confirm, likely refine the factor structure, and evaluate the reliability and validity, of the EC-SERVQUAL instrument using confirmatory factor analysis.

Second, the test-retest reliability of the instrument should be evaluated. Measures of reliability include stability and internal consistency. Test-retest reliability examines the stability of an instrument over time. Nunnally (1978) argues that if a measure were intended to represent the relatively enduring status of a trait, it would need to remain stable over the period in which scores were employed for that purpose. Therefore, the stability of the EC-SERVQUAL instrument, including short- and long-range stability, should be assessed using the test-retest correlation method.

Third, an instrument for measuring customer perceptions of service quality of web sites that provide non-digital products should be developed. The EC-SERVQUAL instrument developed herein is limited to the digital marketing environment, decreasing the generalization and applicability of the instrument. Thus, the development and validation of anew instrument suitable for non-digital product providers as well as the comparison of factor structure between the EC-SERVQUAL instrument and the new instrument should be addressed in future investigations.



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Advanced Topics in End User Computing (Vol. 3)
Advanced Topics in End User Computing, Vol. 3
ISBN: 1591402573
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 191

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