The Effect of Internet Experience on Consumer Expectations of Responsiveness and Control in Offline Services Marketing Interactions

The Internet is an exciting innovation whose popularity continues to rapidly increase. As consumers use the Internet, the increase in their control may result in changing expectations of their interactions with businesses in general. The accumulation of successful experiences in obtaining information and negotiating terms during active, self-initiated and self-controlled online interactions may lead consumers to expect more responsiveness and control over offline marketing interactions. This paper reports a study conducted to examine the hypothesis that greater amounts of Internet experience would be associated with higher service expectations for offline transactions. The results of the study suggest that consumers with moderate levels of web usage expertise have higher expectations than do consumers with low or high levels of web usage expertise. In other words, this study finds a inverted “U” relationship between web usage expertise and consumers’ expectations of service providers.