The Internet and Service Quality

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The Internet and Service Quality

• Tim Beal
• Victoria University of Wellington
• New Zealand
•  X Betriebswirtschaftliche Tage zu Schwerin
• October 2000

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Outline

• Nature of services
• Model of internet-mediated service interaction
• Impact of the Internet

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Nature of services

• Compared with goods services are..
• Intangible performance
• Customers are part of process
• people as part of product
• quality control difficult
• harder for customers to evaluate
• no inventories cannot be stored
• Time factor
• nature of distribution differs

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Internet double impact

• impacts on differences between goods and services
• impacts on traditional delivery of services

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Internet mediation model

• Overhead

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Model Internet

• 2 Main components
• World wide web
• Email
• Should be combined
• ie website should
• be interactive
• encourage interaction

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Model Customer

• Customer
• needs, wants, expectations
• expectation ltgtreality
• gap between expectation and evaluation crucial

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Model Provider (I)

• Assets, competencies, perceptions (of customer
  etc), goals
• Gives to internet facility
• resources
• management skill (designing website to attract
  customers, facilitate service delivery)
• mix of automatic response/ processing and human
  intervention

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Model Provider (II)

• Gets from internet facility
• monitoring of performance
• Recording of customer information/actions
• gtgtrelationship with customer

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Model Consequences

• Is customer satisfied or dissatisfied? Degree?
• Loyal (repeat purchase), disloyal, indifferent?
• effect on reputation good words or bad words

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Model Organisational learning

• Opportunity for organisation to learn from
  interaction
• complaint handling
• service improvement
• staff training
• staff reward/punishment

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Impact of internet (I)

• Impacts on differences between goods and services
• Hybrid which combines some characteristics of
  goods
• eg Internet services have tangible outcomes
• conversation ltgt email

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Quality control

• Automatic service transactions (AST)
• eg ordering books, CDs
• quality can be monitored and measured
• similar to car assembly line
• Semi-automatic service transactions
• eg email with travel agent
• recordinggtgtself-censorship
• Negative aspects
• dehumanisation
• safety first

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Impact of Internet (II)

• impacts on traditional delivery of services
• Time
• 24 hours/ 365 days
• rapid response
• asynchronous no waiting around
• Place
• location neutral gtgtglobalisation

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other impacts..

• globalisationgtgt cross-cultural communication
• Cost ..great savings
• Comparability
• easier for customers to compare alternatives
• Trialability
• software to sex

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Personalisation

• Allows personalisation and can lead to
  relationship building
• Paradox personalisation via machine?
• Limitations and characteristics of Internet need
  to be carefully considered if it is to improve
  service quality