اندازه گیری کیفیت خدمات الکترونیکی و اهمیت آن برای رضایت مشتری و وفاداری: مطالعه تجربی در یک محیط مخابراتی Measuring e-service quality and its importance to customer satisfaction and loyalty: an empirical study in a telecom setting

Introduction Over the past decade, the use of internet has grown exponentially, and its infuence is highly visible in many industries [1]. Customers can easily access services through e-channels almost at any time and place, and thus this convenient service method is rapidly replacing traditional service channels [2]. Therefore, many services have embraced online channels. For individual telecom businesses, an increasing number of people are choosing electronic channels to complete service or commerce transactions [3–5], and this activity has become increasingly common among mobile users. Quality is the key element to business achievements [6]. According to the definition of [7], service quality is “the overall evaluation of a specifc service frm that results from comparing that frm’s performance with the customer’s general expectations of how frms in that industry should perform”. Service quality plays an essential role in achieving important goals, including developing trust, improving satisfaction, and cultivating loyalty [8], which are recognized as vital factors in business competitiveness and success. For this reason, service quality has been studied extensively in traditional telecom service settings, and some scales for measuring it have been constructed (e.g., [3, 9]). However, online service is diferent from service in traditional service environments [10]. Firstly, the human element is absent in e-channels: interactions or communications between customer and business mostly rely on computers or mobiles [6]. From human–computer interaction (HCI) perspective, the factors infuencing online service quality, or e-service quality (e-SQ), are quite diferent from those in the traditional physical service channels. Secondly, compared to a physical service environment, online service customization is not direct [6]. Sufcient customer information should be gathered and processed to customize service online. Thus, studies of telecom service quality in the traditional service environment may not be suitable for an online service context. For example, Gautam [3] found that the employee performance emerged as the most important determinant of traditional telecom service quality, and obviously this fnding was not applied for the online services. Currently, user experience (UX) emerges as an increasing important component in HCI, and it is tightly related to service quality. It goes beyond traditional usability and contains afective aspects such as positive feelings interacting with products, desire to reuse or recommendation and so on [11, 12]. So, UX has been reported in many felds as vital, even decisive, factors in user behavior [13, 14]. Customer satisfaction and loyalty are both outcomes of positive UX, which means UX is an important research area. Therefore, one of aims of the current study tends to construct measurement scale and to discuss e-service quality from the perspective of UX, and we especially try to collect evaluations and opinions from experienced consumers. The current studies related to e-SQ mainly focus on traditional e-service such as e-retailing and e-banks. E-service satisfaction and loyalty in telecom are vital for the industry as well, for which mobile technology is far more than voice communication and text messages, and e-service in telecom is quite diferent from that in traditional e-commerce [15].