For providers of electronic services, quality is a major driving
force on the route to long-term success. Comprehensive
measurement of quality, in turn, is the key to effective
quality management. Marketing academia has just started
to attend to quality measurement in the context of electronic
services. A review of existing literature on the
subject reveals that important research gaps exist, both
conceptually and methodologically. Building on extant
research and findings from a qualitative study, the authors
develop a broadly applicable, hierarchical quality model
for electronic services, which includes three dimensions
and nine subdimensions. The proposed model is rigorously
tested by means of a large aggregated sample drawn from
the customer bases of three different electronic services.
The authors find support for the conceptualization and discuss
important findings of the study as well as implications
for managerial practice and research.
Keywords: electronic services; Internet; quality measurement;
empirical study
Electronic services have recently received considerable
attention in academic research. Rust (2001) defined
the concept as “the provision of service over electronic
networks” (p. 283). He located it at the intersection of
two major developments in the business world: the growing
importance of services and the increasing acceptance
of information and communication technology as an
exchange medium, most notably the Internet. Indeed,
contributions to research on electronic services mainly
originate from the fields of services marketing (e.g.,
Janda, Trocchia, and Gwinner 2002) and electronic commerce
(e.g., Sultan et al. 2002), as well as information
systems researc ...