E-SEQUAL: A Customer-Centred Approach to Providing Value in E-Commerce Environments

With an increasing competition in the E-marketplace, generating experiences that exceed the customer’s expectations is important in order to acquire and then retain customers. A customer’s experience with E-Commerce extends beyond the interaction with the Web site. Other features such as credit card handling, delivery of products, post-sales support, and so on, influence the customer’s perceptions of value and service quality. Our research goal has been to investigate how, in addition to usability, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies can be incorporated into the design of E-Commerce. In our cross-disciplinary research programme we have applied a variety of techniques to investigate customers’ expectations and perceptions of service quality. In this paper we describe a framework called E-SEQUAL. E-SEQUAL is an evaluation instrument consisting of CRM and usability heuristics which can be applied to integrate customers’ perceived dimensions of service quality into the design and evaluation of E-Commerce. Author