Service quality delivery through web sites: A critical review of extant knowledge

Evidence exists that service quality delivery through Web sites is an essential strategy to success, possibly more important than low price and Web presence. To deliver superior service quality, managers of companies with Web presences must first understand how customers perceive and evaluate online customer service. Information on this topic is beginning to emerge from both academic and practitioner sources, but this information has not yet been examined as a whole. The goals of this article are to review and synthesize the literature about service quality delivery through Web sites, describe what is known about the topic, and develop an agenda for needed research. In the offline worl...30% of a company’s resources are spent providing a good customer experience and 70% goes to marketing. But online...70% should be devoted to creating a great customer experience and 30% should be spent on “shouting” about it. Valarie A. Zeithaml is the Roy and Alice Richards Bicentennial Professor and Area Chair at the Kenan-Flagler Business School of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She obtained an M.B.A. and doctorate from the University of Maryland and has devoted the past 20 years to researching and teaching the topics of service quality and services management. She is the author of three service books:Delivery Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations, Driving Customer Equity, andServices Marketing, a textbook now in its second edition. She has won numerous teaching and research awards, including the Ferber Award from theJournal of Consumer Research, the Maynard Award from theJournal of Marketing, the Jagdish Sheth Award from theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science, and the O’Dell Award from theJournal of Marketing Research. She has consulted with more than 40 service and product companies. A. Parasuraman (D.B.A., Indiana University) is a professor and holder of the James W.McLamore Chair in Marketing at the University of Miami. He has received many distinguished teaching and research awards. In 1988, he was selected as one of the “Ten Most Influential Figures in Quality” by the editorial board ofThe Quality Review. In 1998, he received the American Marketing Association’s “Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award.” In 2001, he received the Academy of Marketing Science’s “Outstanding Marketing Educator Award.” Dr. Parasuraman has published numerous articles in leading scholarly and managerial journals. He has served as editor of theJournal of the Academy of Marketing Science for a 3-year term (1997–2000). He has authored or coauthored several books, the most recent of which isTechno-Ready Marketing: How and Why Your Customers Adopt Technology (2001). Arvind Malhotra is an assistant professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has conducted award-winning research on how companies exploit information technology to reinvent themselves for e-business. He teaches e-commerce strategies to executive M.B.A.s and strategic use of information technology to M.B.A. students.