Quality of electronic services - Conceptualizing and testing a hierarchical model

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.