Date of Award

1998

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Edith Cowan University

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Science, Technology and Engineering

First Supervisor

Julie Johnson

Abstract

As customers become more sophisticated and competition increases in the marketplace, companies need to provide better service to gain a competitive advantage. The World Wide Web (WWW) offers companies the opportunity to provide service to their customers 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Companies are taking advantage of this opportunity by making the WWW the customer service tool of the future. This project was conducted to develop a model for evaluating the level of customer service and support provided by corporate Web sites. The model was developed by adapting Lovelock’s Flower of Service Model (1994) to Web based operations. Lovelock’s model is based on the observation that most companies provide a core product or service but differentiate themselves on the supplementary services they offer. These supplementary services assist the customer in the pretransaction, transaction and posttransaction of the product or service. The model was applied to corporate Web sites of Australian banking and financial institutions. The results of the evaluation provided information on the level of customer support provided by each Web site. The customer support level scores derived from the evaluation provide companies with a tool for comparison of their own web sites with those of competitors and of the industry in general.

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E-Commerce Commons

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