Factors influencing website attractiveness (SERVQUAL)

In order to deal with this issue it is important to understand what we exactly mean with website attractiveness. I believe that website attractiveness is a service provided by the website owners.

So, to be able to tell what factors influence website attractiveness I read four top journals about measurement of service quality. I related these top journals with this research question and that resulted in the following outcomes.

In this matter customer satisfaction is very important. We can only say something about website attractiveness when we know whether the customer is satisfied or not, because customer satisfaction is the only thing visible and measurable for the website owners.

Satisfaction is described as a "post-consumption evaluation of perceived quality" (Anderson and Fornell 1994, p.245). In other words: "quality is one of the service dimensions factored into the consumer's satisfaction judgement" (Parasuraman et al. 1985, 1988).

Measurement of service quality can be done on two scales; the SERVQUAL scale and the SERVPERF scale. The SERVQUAL scale represents the difference between service expectations and actual service performance. Using the SERVQUAL scale the service quality is sufficient when the actual service performance is higher than the service expectations on forehand.

SERVPERF is a performance-only measure of service quality. The expectations are not considered in this case. In a subsequent cross-sectional empirical test, SERVPERF is shown to outperform SERVQUAL (Brady et al. 2002).

Although SERVPERF outperforms SERVQUAL the dimensions used within SERVQUAL can be considered as useful for measuring customer satisfaction related to Leukstebijbaan.nl. The dimensions are focussed on the relation between the service provider and the customer. Some important dimensions used within SERVQUAL and used to measure the service quality (and therefore the website attractiveness) are:

• The reliability of the service provider

• The assurance provided by the service staff

• The empathy shown to consumers

In an on-line questionnaire you can test the reliability of the service provider by asking for the opinion on how serious the website is, in what measure people are willing to fill in personal information on the particular website and in what measure people would recommend the website to friends.

The assurance provided by the service staff is tested by asking for what people think about the quantity of the available services or whatsoever, whether people would visit the website again and whether people would recommend the website to other people.

The empathy shown to consumers is tested by asking for how easy the website is to find on the internet, how easy it is to navigate on the website and what people think about the looks of the website.

Two other dimensions used in the SERVQUAL measurement and important to measure service quality are:

• The responsiveness of the service provider

• The tangible aspects of the service.

It is not always wise to directly ask for expectations of the visitors. While expectations could be useful to test service quality, you could want a more objective view on how visitors see the website without being prejudiced. By not asking for expectations you do not give people the intention to think about their expectations related to the actual service performance. This is done following the ideas of SERVPERF based on attitude. On the other hand, you can make use of some expectations if you consider the following:

Oliver (1980) suggest that consumers form an attitude about a service provider on the basis of their prior expectations about the performance of the firm, and this attitude affects their intentions to purchase from that organization.

So, an important factor is also purchase intentions of people (Cronin and Taylor, 1992; Babakus and Boller, 1992). This is about whether people are willing to use the service provided by the website. This is an import dimension to test service quality as well.

References which apply to this article are shown below together with other useful sources:

Anderson, E.W. & Fornell, C. 1994. A customer satisfaction research prospectus. Services marketing: new directions in theory and practices. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications pp. 241-68

Babakus, E. & Boller, GW. 1992. An empirical assessment of the SERVQUAL scale.

Journal of Business Research 1992;24:253-68 (May)

Barnes, S. & Vidgen, R. 2000, WebQual: An Exploration of Web-site Quality. University of Bath

Brady, M.K.& Cronin, J.J. 2001. Some New Thoughts on Conceptualizing Perceived Service Quality: A Hierachical Approach. Journal of Marketing, 65: 34

Brady, M.K., Cronin, J.J. & Brand, R.R. 2002. Performance-only measurement of service quality: a replication and extension. Academy of Management Journal, 55: 17-31.

Cronin, J.J. & Taylor, S.A. 1994. SERVPERF Versus SERVQUAL: Reconciling Performance-Based and Perceptions-Minus-Expectations Measurement of Service Quality. Journal of Marketing, 58: 125

Cronin, J.J. & Taylor, S.A. 1992. Measuring Service Quality: A Reexamination and Extension. Journal of Marketing, 56: 55

DeLone, W.H. & McLean, E.R. 1992. Information Systems Success: the Quest for the Dependant Variable. Information Systems Research, pp. 60-95

Garvin, D. 1984. What does product quality mean?. Sloan Management Review, No. 4, pp. 25-43

Grönroos, C. 1984. A Service Quality Model and Its Marketing Implications. European Journal of Marketing, 18 (44), 36-44

Oliver, R.L. 1980. A cognitive model of the antecedents and outcomes of satisfaction decisions. Journal Marketing Research 1980;17:460-9

Straub, D. (2004). Foundations of Net-Enhanced Organizations, John Wiley & Sons Inc.