Rust & Lemon (2001) suggest that E-service is more than order fulfillment, more than responsiveness to inquiries, and status requests. The true nature of E-service is providing customers with a superior experience with respect to the interactive flow of information. The extant literature and extensive focus group research in Zeithaml et al. (2000) study suggest that the customers’ evaluation of a website’s quality includes not only experiences during their interactions with the site, but also post interaction service aspects (e.g., fulfillment, returns).
As such, E-service quality is defined broadly to encompass all phases of a customer’s interactions with a website: “The extent to which a website facilitates efficient and effective shopping, …show more content…
Service quality as perceived by customers has been theoretically represented as consisting of two dimensions, i.e., technical quality and functional quality. Grönroos (1990) made a distinction between both dimensions. Technical quality (or “process quality”) refers to how the service is delivered, whereas functional quality (or “outcome quality”) refers to what customers receive (i.e., the benefits of using the …show more content…
Online services have unique characteristics that offline services do not possess, which can affect the perception of service quality. These characteristics could include, for example, server problems, outages for backing up information, and connectivity issues (Collier & Bienstock, 2006).
Unfortunately, up to now, a generally accepted definition of E-service quality has not existed. As has been note by Fassnacht & Koese (2006), most of the researchers neither define the exact domain of their quality construct nor provide a clear-cut definition of E-services. When definitions are provided, they differ on coverage from article to article and are not sufficiently explanatory with regard to what exactly they are including. Barrutia & Gilsanz (2009) identified the most relevant differences:
a) focus on the internet vs. focus on electronic channels in general (e.g., automated teller machines, mobile phones, interactive
As such, E-service quality is defined broadly to encompass all phases of a customer’s interactions with a website: “The extent to which a website facilitates efficient and effective shopping, …show more content…
Service quality as perceived by customers has been theoretically represented as consisting of two dimensions, i.e., technical quality and functional quality. Grönroos (1990) made a distinction between both dimensions. Technical quality (or “process quality”) refers to how the service is delivered, whereas functional quality (or “outcome quality”) refers to what customers receive (i.e., the benefits of using the …show more content…
Online services have unique characteristics that offline services do not possess, which can affect the perception of service quality. These characteristics could include, for example, server problems, outages for backing up information, and connectivity issues (Collier & Bienstock, 2006).
Unfortunately, up to now, a generally accepted definition of E-service quality has not existed. As has been note by Fassnacht & Koese (2006), most of the researchers neither define the exact domain of their quality construct nor provide a clear-cut definition of E-services. When definitions are provided, they differ on coverage from article to article and are not sufficiently explanatory with regard to what exactly they are including. Barrutia & Gilsanz (2009) identified the most relevant differences:
a) focus on the internet vs. focus on electronic channels in general (e.g., automated teller machines, mobile phones, interactive