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CUSTOMER SATISFACTION WITH E-SERVICES:

THE CASE OF AN ONLINE RECRUITMENT PORTAL

Veronica Liljander

Allard C.R. van Riel

Minna Pura

To be published in the Yearbook of Services Management 2002 – E-Services,

(Eds.) Bruhn. M. and B. Stauss. Forthcoming end of 2001.

Biographical notes:

Veronica Liljander is an Assistant Professor at the Swedish School of Economics and

Business Administration, Marketing Department, Helsinki, Finland. At the time of writing this

paper she was a visiting scholar at the University of Maastricht, Maastricht Academic Center

for Research in Services (MAXX). She has published articles on customer relationships and

service quality in international journals and edited books. She is on the Editorial Review

Board of the European Journal of Marketing. Address in Finland: Department of Marketing,

P.O. Box 479, 00101 Helsinki, Finland. E-mail address: Veronica.Liljander@shh.fi

Allard C. R. van Riel is a Doctoral Candidate in the Department of Management Sciences,

Section Marketing and Marketing Research, University of Maastricht. His research interests

include: service innovation, decision-making under uncertainty, consumer evaluations of e-

services and brand extensions. He has published e.g. in the Journal of Service Research.

Address: P.O. box 616, NL-6200 MD Maastricht, the Netherlands; phone: +31 43 3883778;

fax: +31 43 3884918. E-mail address: A.vanRiel@mw.unimaas.nl

Minna Pura has a M.Sc. (Econ) from the Swedish School of Economics and Business

Administration. She is currently working as a Research Planner, especially in the area of

Internet research, in Eera Finland Oy, Helsinki, Finland. Empirical data for this study were

collected for her Master’s thesis in Marketing. E-mail address: Minna.Pura@eerafinland.fi

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ABSTRACT

E-services remain a neglected area in marketing research. This paper provides a

review of current knowledge on consumer evaluations of online services. An

illustrative case is presented and directions for future research are developed. There

is a lack of research on the effect on consumer evaluations of services when shifting

from interpersonal service interactions to self-service technologies, such as e-

services. Companies should pay attention to the perceived value of all included

services. Especially in online services, the quality of supporting and complementary

services plays a major role in consumers’ overall value perceptions.

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1 INTRODUCTION

In this contribution we aim to present a state of the art review of academic literature

on e-service quality and customer satisfaction with online services. We illustrate

some of the research issues by means of a presentation of an empirical study,

performed with respect to an online job-search service, or so-called job board. In

addition we develop a number of suggestions for further research.

For a steadily increasing number of consumers1, online services are becoming not

only a viable, but also an attractive alternative to visiting service outlets or phoning

call centres (HR-Focus 2000; Tracking 2001). Inconvenient opening hours of private

and public service outlets have limited consumers’ possibilities to consume them at

leisure, whereas online services offer 24 h availability and other valuable benefits.

Reasons why customers are thought to prefer self-service technologies (SST), such

as electronic services (e-services) are: convenience (Meuter et al. 2000; Szymanski

and Hise 2000), avoiding human contact, saving time (Dabholkar 1996; Meuter et al.

2000), and feeling more in control of the service process (Bateson 2000; Bateson

1985; Dabholkar 1996).

Services research has not adequately captured the rapid expansion into e-services.

There is a need for more conceptual and empirical research, and not only on

motivations why consumers prefer e-services to traditional services, but also on how

they choose among competing e-services. Service quality, customer satisfaction and

loyalty are issues figuring prominently in traditional services research. Until now,

however, our understanding has been largely built on studies of service processes

with a strong interpersonal character and little attention has been paid to how service

evaluations change when customers interact with technology. Therefore an important

question is, to what extent traditional service quality models, such as SERVQUAL

1 According to HR Focus (2000), 83 million consumers, or 40 % of the U.S population over 16 now use theInternet compared to 66 million in 1998. Finland has been at the forefront of consumer usage of the Internet(Computer Industry Almanac Inc. 1998). According to an Internet tracking survey from February 2001(http://www.toy.fi/tuotteet/internet/inet3.htm) 59 % of Finnish 15-74 year olds had used the Internet for otherthings than e-mail in the past 3 months and 30% of the population used the Internet daily (an increase of 31 %from February 2000).

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(Parasuraman et al. 1991), can accommodate technology by adding a fourth leg to

the services marketing pyramid (Parasuraman 1996). A sound theoretical basis and

extensive empirical research are needed in order to answer that question. Traditional

service quality dimensions may not be appropriate in their original form, but the

differences between consumer evaluations of e-services and traditional services

need also not be so large that traditional models have to be discarded completely.

Based on recent publications (Grönroos et al. 2000; Kaynama and Black 2000;

Zeithaml et al. 2000), we propose that traditional quality dimensions, such as those in

SERVQUAL, can be adapted to capture the new media. Additional dimensions will be

needed, however, in order to fully explain consumer evaluations of e-services.

Our approach in this paper is to first summarise and discuss current research on

consumer evaluations of e-service quality. Results from an exploratory study of an

online recruitment company (job board) will be presented in order to empirically

illustrate consumer evaluations of an actual e-service. Finally, future research

directions are discussed.

2 LITERATURE REVIEW

We will first examine the concept of an e-service, building on Grönroos et al.’s (2000)

conceptualisation of net offers. This is followed by a review of research on e-service

quality and a discussion of the possibilities of adapting SERVQUAL to accommodate

the unique quality dimensions of e-services.

2.1 E-service offering

Grönroos et al. (1999; 2000) propose, that for services offered on the Internet the

traditional service concept, consisting of a core service complemented by facilitating

and supporting services needs to be extended with a fourth factor, the user interface.

Core, facilitating and supporting services can be interpreted as the content range of

services that the company offers to its customers, while the user interface is the

medium through which the services are provided. Consumers evaluate both what the

company offers (content) and how it is offered (form).

The core service is the main reason for the company to be on the market. Facilitating

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services are mandatory for making the service accessible, whereas supporting, or

supplementary (Anderson and Narus 1995) services are value-adding components

that are used to distinguish the service from competitors’ offerings (Grönroos 1990).

In practice, it is often difficult to distinguish between facilitating and supporting

services (Grönroos et al. 2000).

For example, the core service of an online recruitment service is to act as an

intermediary between recruiting companies and job applicants by posting companies’

job announcements and collecting applicants’ records. Enabling customers to submit

their CV to a job board can be interpreted as a facilitating and mandatory service for

receiving job offers, whereas secure payment is a mandatory facilitating service for

online purchases. Facilitating services could also include customised search engines

and archives, or help-functions and instructions that facilitate customers’ access to

the core service.

In order to be competitive, services have to create value for customers. This can be

achieved by superior core and facilitating services, or by offering value adding

supporting services. Supporting services of a job board could be to offer current job

search related articles and links to other websites. Individual recommendations and

the “1-Click” ordering offered by Amazon.com are also typical supporting services.

However, sustainable competitive advantage can only be achieved if the company

has built an entire system that is difficult to replicate, like IKEA has done in brick-and-

mortar furniture retailing (Edvardsson et al. 2000, p. 68). Small incremental service

developments, or “feature creeps” (Edvardsson et al. 2000, p. 91) differentiate the

service only in the short run. For example, links to other websites, comic strips and

public information are easy to copy by competitors. Furthermore, the value of

supporting services such as articles and different types of information depends

entirely on the applicant’s need for and appreciation of the information content.

Instead of interacting face-to-face with service representatives, customers of e-

services interact with a user interface2. The user interface, or site design, determines

2 It is sometimes possible for customers to interact directly with a service representative through the userinterface, and customers may combine the user interface with direct contact on the phone. However, a discussionof the implications of these options is beyond the scope of the paper.

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how services are delivered to customers and this can be expected to impact their

evaluation of the core, facilitating and supporting services. If a website cannot be

accessed, or if pages download slowly, customers may not have the patience to wait

or try again later (Dabholkar 2000).

In the case of traditional service outlets, the servicescape helps customers

categorise the service (e.g. to distinguish a five-star hotel from a three-star) and it

also affects their evaluation of service quality (Bitner 1992; Wagner 2000). Since

customers cannot evaluate online services with respect to the furniture

(shabby/elegant), or the cleanliness of the surroundings, online providers need other

elements to signal the quality category of the service, or the target audience.

How the information content of the website is communicated to customers through

the user interface is important for online evaluations (Grönroos et al. 2000). Although

technical failures on websites are a serious problem (Meuter et al. 2000), we expect

that companies are more likely to create customer value by means of their core,

facilitating and supporting services than by the design of the user interface.

A small study of customer satisfaction with subscribers of a professional portal site

(Van Riel et al. 2001) offers some support for Grönroos et al.’s (2000) model. Three

factors were extracted from the data corresponding to a core service, supplementary

services and user interface. The user interface had the smallest impact on overall

portal site satisfaction and loyalty, whereas supplementary services had the

strongest effect.

Figure 1 illustrates the four service elements with examples from an online job board.

The figure also suggests five service quality dimensions that could be considered

suitable for e-services. These dimensions are based on SERVQUAL (Parasuraman

et al. 1991) but adapted to e-services. The list is not exhaustive. E-service quality will

be discussed in the following section.

TAKE IN FIGURE 1

Customers’ affective reactions to e-services are presumed to contribute to the

generation of e-satisfaction, but the factor appears to be less important than in the

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case of traditional services. Although Dabholkar (1996) found a strong effect of

enjoyment of technology on service quality evaluation, other studies have indicated

that customer delight or other extremely positive feelings are rare among current SST

users (Meuter et al. 2000; Zeithaml et al. 2000). However, instead of drawing the

conclusion that affective reactions are not important in e-services, one could equally

well assume that most current websites simply lack the ability to positively surprise or

excite their customers and that there is some room for improvement. Customer

satisfaction is also a moderately strong emotional reaction that is affected by both

service performance and experienced feelings (Liljander and Strandvik 1997; Oliver

2000). Degrees of satisfaction could be described as qualitatively different affective

states, each leading to different behavioural responses (Oliver 2000; Oliver and

Westbrook 1993; Stauss 1996; Stauss and Neuhaus 1997; Zahorik et al. 2000).

Thus, affect resulting from service experiences may also be interpreted as different

degrees of satisfaction.

2.2 E-service quality

Traditional service quality research has focused on highly intangible services. Here

the interpersonal character of the delivery largely determines the perceived quality of

the service. Hence, service quality dimensions developed for traditional services can

not be directly applied to e-services, as they are not of an interpersonal nature.

Grönroos et al. (1999; 2000) do not make any suggestions with respect to quality

dimensions of net offers, but Parasuraman and Grewal (2000, p. 171) suggest that

research is needed on whether “the definitions and relative importance of the five

service quality dimensions change when customers interact with technology rather

than with service personnel.” The SERVQUAL scales (Parasuraman et al. 1991) can

evidently not be applied as such to e-services, but dimensions that closely resemble

them can, in our opinion, be constructed. Nonetheless, additional dimensions may be

needed to fully capture the construct of e-service quality (Zeithaml et al. 2000).

Moreover, we must keep in mind that SERVQUAL mainly captures interpersonal

interactions that may even exclude the core service, such as the quality of food

ordered from an online supermarket, the medical advice received from an online

medical service, or job offers received from an employment office. SERVQUAL

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doesn’t distinguish core, supporting and facilitating services either, but the

dimensions can be assumed to cover all services offered by the company. We

believe that measuring the perceived quality of the core and supporting services is of

the greatest importance for the assessment of e-satisfaction and e-loyalty.

Kaynama and Black (2000) and Zeithaml et al. (2000) have recently proposed a

number of e-quality dimensions. We tentatively suggest that several of these

dimensions could be classified under the five more abstract e-quality dimensions that

are listed in Figure 1, i.e. reliability, responsiveness, customisation, assurance/trust

and user interface.

In a first attempt to adapt the SERVQUAL dimensions to e-services, Kaynama and

Black (2000) subjectively evaluated the online services of 23 travel agencies on

seven dimensions derived from SERVQUAL: responsiveness, content and purpose

(derived from reliability), accessibility, navigation, design and presentation (all

derived from tangibles), background (assurance), and personalisation and

customisation (derived from empathy). In our opinion, simply replacing assurance by

‘background’ does not improve its applicability in e-services. Assurance and trust are

established concepts in marketing that perfectly cover ‘the reputation of the

company’, as background is defined in the article.

Zeithaml et al. (2000) conducted six focus group interviews with customers having

some experience with online purchases (1-8 purchases per month). Interpretation of

the interviews resulted in eleven e-quality dimensions: reliability, responsiveness,

access, and flexibility, ease of navigation, efficiency, assurance/trust,

security/privacy, price knowledge, site aesthetics and customisation/personalisation.

The dimensions are very similar to those proposed by Kaynama and Black (2000).

Flexibility and product knowledge differ most from the other dimensions and merit

further attention.

From a consumer point of view, the dimension of ‘flexibility’ describes a fairly

restricted flexibility3 and does not include individualised services. It refers to the

3 In Hornby’s (1974) edition of Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English, flexibility isdescribed as “easily changed to suit new conditions; (of persons) adaptable”.

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option to choose from pre-selected alternatives, for example a number of alternative

shipping or payment modes. This could more appropriately be called ‘service

options’, or ‘product options’ to reflect that it ought to cover also the range of core

services or physical products offered by the company. Zeithaml et al. (2000) also

include customised search functions as part of this dimension. The common factor

for this dimension is that it seems to cover alternatives within facilitating services. A

broad selection of merchandise is interpreted in the article as part of the dimension

‘customisation’ (Zeithaml et al. 2000).

Contrary to expectations, the term ‘Price knowledge’ does not refer to customers’

general or specific price knowledge but rather to ‘price transparency’, or ‘price

display’, in other words to how well prices are displayed on the site and,

consequently, how easy it is for customers to ‘find out about the price’, ‘find out about

shipping charges’ etc. This dimension is, of course, irrelevant for services that are

offered free of charge.

The proposed eleven dimensions do not completely cover consumer evaluations of

core and supporting services. Supporting services like book recommendations are

somewhat inconveniently listed under ‘customisation’, but other important supporting

services, such as discussion forums, selections of relevant news articles or reviews

are not covered by any of the dimensions.

We will now shortly describe the five adapted e-quality dimensions: user interface,

responsiveness, reliability, customisation and assurance.

The design of the User Interface replaces the dimension of tangibility in SERVQUAL.

It covers the overall design (Kaynama and Black 2000; Szymanski and Hise 2000),

ease of navigation (Kaynama and Black 2000; Zeithaml et al. 2000), overall ease of

use (Dabholkar 1996), called ‘efficiency’ in Zeithaml et al. (2000), and aesthetics

(Zeithaml et al. 2000). Access (Kaynama and Black 2000; Zeithaml et al. 2000) is

difficult to place without further research but could tentatively be included under the

user interface at this stage. In the early stages of SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al.

1985) access was conceived as a separate dimension but in later stages it was

incorporated into empathy (Parasuraman et al. 1991). This does not seem to be

appropriate here. ‘Access’ depends on customers having access to the Internet and

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trouble free connections, but it also depends on the company’s marketing efforts in

making the website known to customers.

Site design (Szymanski and Hise 2000) and ease of use (Dabholkar 1996; Meuter et

al. 2000) have been shown to affect service quality perception and satisfaction with

SST’s. However, Meuter et al. (2000) also found that whereas technology failures

and design problems were remembered as dissatisfying incidents, consumers never

reported correctly functioning technology as satisfactory.

Responsiveness, or sending a timely response to e-mail requests or complaints, and

confirmations of orders are important in e-services as well (Kaynama and Black

2000; Zeithaml et al. 2000). Although it is technically easy to send customers an

automatic confirmation that their e-mail was received, or that their order has been

submitted, even this simple service is often absent. Furthermore, more is not always

better and Zeithaml et al. (2000) expect consumer evaluations of responsiveness to

have an inverted U-shape.

Reliability has been interpreted as the currency and accuracy of product information

(Kaynama and Black 2000; Zeithaml et al. 2000), the technical functioning of the site

and the accuracy of execution of service promises (Zeithaml et al. 2000). To be

considered reliable, online retailers need to deliver the correct goods, in accurate

amounts, in good condition and within the promised time frame.

Customisation and Personalisation is equivalent to empathy in interpersonal services

(Kaynama and Black 2000; Zeithaml et al. 2000). Interpersonal service

(personalisation) was not perceived as value adding for online services (Zeithaml et

al. 2000). Personalisation could also mean customising the service to individual

preferences. However, customers resent it when companies collect unnecessary

information about them or force them to fill out lengthy questionnaires if they want to

buy something on the web (Zeithaml et al. 2000). It is one reason for quitting the site

before making a purchase. Customisation can take different forms. For example, the

facilitating service of saving a CV at a job board gives applicants the opportunity to

update the CV at leisure and to attach it to job applications. Companies’ own online

recruitment sites may not offer this option. Value is also added when the service is

customised so that applicants can limit their job searches to specific industries,

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regions or positions.

Websites can also be customised without the end-customer being aware of it. There

have been examples of more dubious practices where less price sensitive

customers, without being aware of it, were offered goods at higher prices than

customers who were known to be more price sensitive . Amazon.com was criticised

for charging fees to publishers for recommending their books to its customers

(Wingfield and Rose 2001).

Trust is considered to be one of the most important drivers of e-service satisfaction

(Petersen 2001; Urban et al. 2000; Wingfield and Rose 2001). It is most often treated

as a one-dimensional construct (e.g. Dwyer et al. 1987; Garbarino and Johnson

1999; Morgan and Hunt 1994) that is affected by past experiences of

reliable/competent service and benevolent behaviour (Berry 1999; Liljander and

Roos 2001; Singh and Sirdeshmukh 2000). This is also reflected in one of the

examples given in Zeithaml et al. (2000, p. 19): “I trust Barnes and Noble because I

have come to trust them through repeated positive experiences.” Four types of trust

have been identified (Johnson and Grayson 2000): process-based (based on past

interactions), generalised (based on norms), system-based (e.g. government

regulations) and personality-based (some people have more faith than others). All

may be relevant for e-services.

Zeithaml et al.’s (2000) dimensions of assurance and security/privacy can be termed

trust dimensions. Assurance implies that the customer has confidence in the

company, that the site is well known, sells reputable brands, offers guarantees and

posts ratings by other customers. Fair treatment of customers in cases of service

failure is not included by Zeithaml et al. (2000), but has a strong impact on trust

(Berry 1999; Tax et al. 1998). Trust can be latent (Wilson 1995) and it may not be

activated until the customer has had an extremely positive or negative service

experience.

As noted by Zeithaml et al. (2000), more research is needed to determine the

dimensionality of e-service quality. Studies are also needed for different types of e-

services. Next, we will present findings from an empirical study of an online

recruitment service.

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3 CASE: AN ONLINE RECRUITMENT SERVICE

Specialised websites have recently developed into an important recruitment tool. A

recent online survey by ERC Dataplus with self-selected respondents found that 77%

of the responding companies used job boards and 72 % posted job offers on their

own website (Dataplus 2001). An impressive 46% of the companies had hired

employees through their own site and only 25% had not hired any new employees

through job boards. Nonetheless, the novelty of the service is shown by the fact that

only 16% of the companies had been recruiting via job boards for more than two

years. High tech companies were among the first to actively recruit employees

online. The Finnish telecommunications company Sonera for example, receives 90%

of its job applications via the Internet (Mård 1999). However, online recruitment is

now becoming common in a wide variety of industries, as demonstrated by the ERC

Dataplus survey. The advantages of online recruitment for hiring companies and

applicants are savings in time and money (Berta 2000; Dillion 1998).

Job boards were relatively new in Finland at the time of the study. Although several

job boards existed, most of them targeted jobs in engineering. There was a clear

need for a wider range of services. The focal job board started up in April 1999 and

the empirical study was conducted between November 1999 and January 2000.

Main competition consisted of two commercial job boards and the online job board of

the public employment office. The services were free of charge for applicants

whereas the recruiting companies paid a weekly fee for announcements on the

private job boards. The announcements also created visibility for the recruiting

companies. With the purpose of attracting applicants to the companies’ own

recruitment pages many companies sponsor the job boards, making use of banner

advertising and hypertext links.

The studied company believed that customers could be tied to the portal by offering

them added value in the form of interesting links, articles, discussion groups,

information on education and entrepreneurial advice, in other words, by adding

supporting services. However, the core service, i.e. a large number of job postings in

different industries was believed to be the most important for creating confidence in

the company. According to interviews with employees and observations made by one

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of the authors, who temporarily worked for the company, employees appeared to be

well informed about the needs and desires of the recruiting companies, but less

knowledgeable about job applicants’ satisfaction with the site. The portal had recently

been improved to include a publicly accessible database containing applicants’ CV’s.

To protect applicants who did not want their current employers to know that they

were looking for work, it was possible to post records anonymously and to forbid the

company from sending applicants’ records to certain companies. Open4 records

offered better services for both applicants and recruiting companies. Applicants were

able to update their CV’s continuously and companies could also browse all CV’s at

leisure. By offering companies this self-service and participation in the recruitment

process, the job board’s workload decreased. However, open records always need to

be edited and monitored for inappropriate texts.

Our study was initiated in September 1999, at a time when, to our knowledge, there

existed no published studies on consumer evaluations of e-services. The study was

based on Grönroos et al.’s (1999) net offer model, but SERVQUAL dimensions

(Parasuraman et al. 1985; Parasuraman et al. 1991) were also partially considered.

First, interviews were conducted with a small number of job applicants. Second, an

online survey was designed and sent to all applicants in the company’s register.

Results from the interviews will be described first.

3.1 Interviews

Eight interviews were conducted in November 1999 with applicants from each job

category. The most recent applications were chosen, so that respondents would

remember the service well. However, this also meant that they had limited

experience with the site. Semi-structured telephone interviews were conducted with

each applicant, using an extensive interview guide that covered customer satisfaction

with different service elements, and perceived relative importance of these elements.

The applicants were mainly interested in viewing job postings and in submitting their

4 This means that anyone could access the CV's. Otherwise it's normal that only the job board sees the CV, picksout suitable candidates and presents them to companies. Anyone can go into this open forum and look at anyoneelse’s CV.

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CV (core and facilitating services). Few had read the instructions for applicants

(facilitating service) and although some had used links and looked at articles

(supporting services), they had no recollection of their content. One respondent

mentioned another supplementary service, a daily cartoon, as an advantage over

competitors’ sites, because it offered a nice introduction to the site and put the

applicant in a good mood. All respondents had used competitors’ services and

perceived the portals to be very similar in outline. Some experienced the focal

website as easier to use and as somewhat more colourful than the competition.

The section for posting CV’s was better evaluated than the ‘open jobs’ section.

Posting the CV gives the applicant a feeling of control, confidence and hope that he

or she will find a job. Although the applicants were satisfied with the services, they

were not enthusiastic but rather neutral in their evaluation of the site and said that

there was nothing to complain about. The overall impression was that the portal had

no relative advantage over competing services.

A well-designed user interface, i.e. a layout that is clear and easy to use, was

considered to be very important. Pages should download quickly and it should be

easy to find what one is looking for, but it should also be easy to return to previous

pages (easy navigation). However, they also mentioned that although the

attractiveness of the site is important for a first impression, the content is thereafter

more important than a striking appearance.

Users expect quick responses on the Internet and an online company should

respond within two days to any request. The focal company sent customised

responses to the applicants to let them know, that their CV had been received so this

was not considered a problem. Overall, responsiveness was not perceived to be a

problem in this company but rather better than the responsiveness of competitors.

Confidence in the service was important and related to the overall image that

applicants had of the company. Job postings as well as the site as a whole should

have a professional appearance. One applicant was not familiar with the company

and would not have posted a CV without a referral from a reliable source. Three out

of eight applicants had posted their records anonymously and perceived this as a

convenient service. One applicant did it simply because it was possible, even though

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it may not have been necessary. Another applicant did it as a security measure,

because of doubts about promised confidentiality on the Internet.

Quality and variety of the job postings were perceived as more important than

quantity. The ability to customise job searches to cover only certain regions and job

types was deemed important, but customising the website and an increased

interaction with the site did not interest the applicants. Competitors also offered

customised websites. One applicant commented that finding a job was more

important than spending time on customising the site, and another applicant noted

that having to use a password only made the service more complicated.

3.2 Survey design

Results from the interviews, observations within the company and the manager’s

wishes and expert opinion were taken into account when designing an online survey

that was conducted in January 2000.

The survey was designed and tested in cooperation with a professional programmer

to make it easy for the applicants to fill out and submit. Data was automatically saved

as a text file that could be imported into the statistical package SPSS. The guidelines

for online research provided by ESOMAR (Joe 1999) were followed. Applicants were

given the opportunity to be deleted from the mailing list and a reminder was not sent

to these persons. Respondents were sent a free Internet magazine if they included

their address but they were also offered the opportunity to answer anonymously. No

one chose to remain anonymous.

In an HTML questionnaire respondents can be forced to answer each question, but it

also means that they have to answer questions that they have no knowledge about.

To avoid responses on service dimensions that the applicants had not experienced, a

“don’t know” option was added. Detailed instructions for filling out the survey were

included, since applicants’ expertise is heterogeneously distributed. Buttons and

drop-down menus were both used to display scales. This brought some variation to

the questions and made the questionnaire look shorter. All respondents got an

automatic “thank you” response to let them know that their answers had been

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successfully received. Participation to the survey was limited to job applicants and

could not be filled out by just anyone who happened to visit the site. Applicants’

records are normally kept online for two months but the company had a register of all

previous applicants. All registered users received an e-mail inviting them to

participate in the survey. E-mails were sent to 742 individuals, but 52 addresses were

no longer in use. Very few respondents wished to be deleted from the list. We

received 114 responses on the first day and a total of 246 responses were received

after a reminder five days later. A manual check revealed two overlapping responses

and five questionnaires were discarded as incomplete, resulting in a final response

rate of 32 %. The distribution of the responses on different job categories was

representative compared to the distribution of applicants in the database.

Respondents were also categorised into three groups depending on when they had

registered with the company (last three months 46%, three months before that 31%,

and earlier 30%). No statistical differences in evaluations were found between these

groups.

Customer satisfaction can be classified into three main categories: 1) performance

that fails to meet expectations and leads to disappointment, 2) expectations which

are met and result in contentment and 3) expectations that are exceeded and lead to

delight (Oliver 2000; Zahorik et al. 2000). Because delight is difficult to translate into

Finnish, different scales were tested during telephone interviews and a ‘very

disappointed-very satisfied’ scale was chosen to assess core, facilitating and

supporting services. The core service was interpreted as quality and quantity of job

offers. Registration and instructions for applicants were identified as facilitating

services. Links, articles and sections for discussion, education and entrepreneurship

were identified as supporting services.

Questions on service quality were constructed based on the interviews, company

beliefs about important factors and SERVQUAL dimensions (see Table 2). For

example, ‘access’, one of the original 10 service quality dimensions suggested by

Parasuraman et al. (1985), was believed to be a problem because the name of the

site did not exactly match the company’s name. In two open-ended questions,

applicants were given the opportunity to state what they believed to be the most

important aspects of online recruitment and to suggest improvements to the service.

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A total of 89 respondents answered the question on importance and 145 the one on

improvement. However, many wrote: “don’t know” or “can’t say” with respect to the

latter.

3.3 Findings

Background questions are presented in Table 1, including the distribution of the

answers. Men and women were equally distributed in the sample, and the

respondents varied in age, education and current position. Of all participants 73%

used the focal job board, another job board, or both as an important information

source for open positions. Respondents seemed to prefer job boards to companies’

own Websites (18%) or job centres (20%), but the daily papers were still an important

information source (52%). Of all respondents 26% reported being currently

unemployed. The unemployed, students and workers were more likely to use job

centres as an information source than people in other positions. Apart from this, no

relation could be found between the use of different media and current position. Most

applicants looked for work in the greater Helsinki area or in the surrounding southern

part of Finland. This is also where most job openings can be found. Less than 10%

had received any job offers from the company. Most applicants visited the job board

weekly. The longer the applicants had been in the company’s register the more likely

they were to visit the site only monthly or less often.

INSERT TABLE 1

Background data was used to test for differences in service element satisfaction and

perceived service quality. No significant differences were found for item or factor

means between gender, age groups (split even), unemployed and employed, or

groups with different educational backgrounds.

3.3.1. Satisfaction with service elements

Only part of the applicants had used supporting services: 75% had read articles, 80%

had used links to other sites, 43% had used the discussion forum and the

educational column, and only 38% had used the entrepreneurial column. Three factor

analyses were therefore conducted on: 1) all items, 2) only core and facilitating

18

service items, and 3) core and facilitating service items and the supplementary

services articles and links. The only difference between the three results was that in

the third analysis, facilitating and supporting services loaded on one factor in a two-

factor solution, but on three factors if a lower eigenvalue was accepted for the third

factor, thereby also improving the communalities. If two factors were extracted from

the complete list of items, facilitating and supporting services also loaded on the

same factor. As previously mentioned, a distinction between facilitating and

supporting services is often difficult to make (Grönroos et al. 2000). Results from the

reduced sample of respondents, but including all items, are presented in Table 2.

INSERT TABLE 2

Respondents were least satisfied with the core service: 23-25% were disappointed

with the quality and number of job postings. Compared to its competitors the

company had a smaller number of job postings and the applicants were aware of it.

This was measured with questions on competitors’ services that will not be presented

in detail here.

Registration as a job applicant is indispensable if one is to receive job offers. It is also

important for the company to be able to show recruiters a large customer base.

Therefore, the task of registering has to be easy and it turned out to be the service

that applicants were most satisfied with. Only 7% were disappointed with the

instructions and 10% with the registration procedure. Facilitating services were

generally perceived as slightly better than competitors’.

However, the company failed to create the expected value with its supporting

services. In the first place, customers hardly used them, and secondly, those who

used them were disappointed (13-20%), or only had neutral feelings (22-36%).

Furthermore, respondents hardly mentioned these services in the open questions,

whereas there were many comments on the core and facilitating services.

In reply to the open question on perceived importance, several respondents (11)

mentioned a continuous updating of articles and job postings as important. 18

respondents wrote that the most important service was to offer work and 10

respondents mentioned the quality of job postings. A larger number and variation of

19

job postings was also included in the suggestions for service improvement. In

addition, there were concrete suggestions on improving the information content of job

postings in order to make job searches easier and better adapted to applicants’

needs. Some respondents also had very specific suggestions for improving the

facilitating services, e.g. how applications should be submitted, the number of past

employments that could be displayed in a CV, functions for activating and

deactivating the CV online, confirmation of a password and improved help functions.

3.3.2. E-service quality dimensions

The number of questions on service quality was kept limited on purpose, in order to

keep the questionnaire short. Most of the questions covered the site in general and

not specific services. Since the interviews revealed that responsiveness was not a

problem in this company it was dropped from the questionnaire. However, we

strongly recommend that future studies include it. The open questions actually

showed that some respondents would have liked improvements on that dimension.

The questions covered site design, accessibility, reliability, assurance, information

content, empathy, customisation and personalisation. When the data was factor

analysed personalisation, measured as: “I want to take an active part in designing the

recruitment service according to my needs” (mean 3.3), loaded only weakly on

empathy and had a low communality, and was therefore dropped. Furthermore, it did

not correlate with a measure of overall site quality. Customisation, which was

measured as: “I can easily search for work based on my personal desires” (mean

3.3), also failed to load on any factor, but correlated significantly with overall quality

(r= 0.36). It was also mentioned as an important factor in the open questions, where

several applicants suggested that this could be improved. Accessibility measured as:

“It is easy to find the company’s website” (mean 3.6) also failed to load on any factor.

Access refers to how well the website has been marketed to the target customers.

Most applicants had found the website through a link on another website, via search

engines, or a newspaper advertisement (Table 1).

The factors that were extracted are presented in Table 3. A larger number of items

on each sub dimension would probably have given a different result and the factors

should be looked upon with some caution.

20

TAKE IN TABLE 3

Items relating to site design (user interface) loaded together with evaluations of

information content. More detailed questions might have separated this factor into

two dimensions. The same applies to the first item of the trust dimension, since

reliability of site functioning is conceptually different from the assurance that the

submitted data will remain in the register and not be misused. The empathy

dimension captures the customer orientation of the site and the last factor covers

customer security/privacy issues.

When applicants’ overall evaluation of the website (5-point scale ranging from very

bad to very good, middle value ‘adequate’, mean 3.6) was regressed on the four

factors, all factors except security had a significant impact on quality. Empathy had

the strongest effect (Std.coeff. 0.372), followed by reliability (Std.coeff. 0.301) and the

site design/content (Std.coeff. 0.235). However, R2 was a relatively low 0.25,

indicating that the dimensions capture only part of the applicants’ quality perceptions

for this service.

It may be noted that the highest scale value (5) was chosen least often for empathy

items (3-4%) and most often for the possibility to forbid the job board from distributing

information to companies named by the applicant (42%). On most other items the

highest value was marked by 15-25% of the respondents. However, the highest

value for overall quality of service, ‘very good’, was chosen by only 5% of the

applicants, thus indicating that they believed that the service could be improved.

In the open questions, two applicants wanted more frequent contact from the job

board and we believe that responsiveness could be a very important quality

dimension, especially if customers perceive deficiencies. Furthermore, two applicants

complained that the recruiting companies should improve their services, especially

responsiveness, e.g. by confirming that an application had been received.

In addition to improvements in job postings and updates, most comments were

related to the site design. Respondents stressed the importance of presenting a clear

outline of the service (37), of user friendliness (ease of use), especially when

submitting an application (21), of the functionality of the site in general (11) and of

21

quick downloads and navigation in particular (8). One respondent suggested that it

should be possible to turn graphics on and off, since they slow down the process,

and ten other respondents also desired faster navigation or a clearer outlook.

Differences in consumer tastes (Wagner 2000) are likely to affect evaluations.

Whereas one of the interviewees liked the cartoon, a survey respondent suggested

that it should be removed because it downgrades the site. Although many applicants

wanted improvements to the site design, five others praised the outlook. Two

respondents perceived the colours of the site as boring, though one admitted that it

was a matter of taste. However, a third respondent perceived the colours as too

salient and felt that they should be dimmed.

Consumers’ expertise with websites can also affect evaluations. A crude self-report

on expertise was used in the focal study but no effects were found. Valid measures

for the level of Web experience need to be developed for future studies. Consumers

may use their experience with other websites as comparison standards in service

evaluation. Zeithaml et al. (2000) found that customers sometimes used best and

worst service experiences, i.e. experience-based norms (Cadotte et al. 1983), as

comparison standards, but that most individuals had difficulties in articulating service

expectations. However, it should be remembered that direct performance measures

on items have consistently outperformed both inferred and direct disconfirmation of

any comparison standard (Liljander 1995; Parasuraman et al. 1994a; Parasuraman

et al. 1994b). Simple overall measures of direct disconfirmation seem to work best

(Zahorik et al. 2000).

Based on the interviews and the online survey it can be concluded that customers of

this job board perceived the services to be adequate or good, but not excellent. To

improve customer satisfaction the job board would have to increase the variety and

number of job postings, but also to take responsibility for the content of the postings.

Recruiting companies may need help with formulating applications that include all the

information that applicants need for efficient and customised job searches.

Furthermore, the company needs to conduct a more detailed investigation of the

supporting services to detect sources of dissatisfaction and find out what customers

desire from this type of services in order to perceive them as value adding. However,

22

the company may also need to add new services that create more value for

customers, such as practical guidelines and forms for writing good CV’s and job

applications. Studies may also be needed on both customers’ and recruiting

companies’ negative experiences with the services. It is well known that companies

learn more from dissatisfied than from satisfied customers. Priorities also need to be

set with respect to expected financial returns on improvements (Zahorik et al. 2000).

4. FUTURE RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

So far the paper has provided an overview of current knowledge on e-service quality.

We also presented findings from an exploratory study of a job board. In the literature

review, many similarities were found between currently proposed e-quality

dimensions and traditional SERVQUAL dimensions. The principal distinction between

traditional and e-services lies in the form of communication between customers and

the company, which changes from interpersonal interaction to interaction with

technology. Further research is needed to discover which dimensions describe

consumer evaluations of e-services best.

The perception to be in control of the service process is important for e-service

customers (Bateson 2000; Zeithaml et al. 2000). In order to experience control, the

design of the user interface has to support easy access to and use of the core,

facilitating and supporting services. In addition, customers still desire reliable service,

responsiveness to inquiries and complaints, assurance of safe transactions and

services that are designed to meet their individual needs. Because research on e-

services is still exploratory, more in-depth conceptual and empirical research is

needed to capture various consumer responses.

The dimensionality of e-service quality perception is undoubtedly a good starting

point. Service quality is believed to affect customers’ behavioural responses, such as

word of mouth, intentions to repurchase the service, or to revisit websites.

Researchers are faced with the challenge of creating measures that capture all

relevant dimensions in a valid and reliable way while at the same time keeping the

questionnaire short. It is not possible to include multiple measures on each of the 11

dimensions listed by Zeithaml et al. (2000) in addition to a range of behavioural and

background variables. Such a questionnaire would be too long for an online survey.

23

Furthermore, future studies on e-quality dimensions should cover all types of

services: public and private services, online retailers, after sales and free of charge

services, professional and consumer services etc. Combinations of interpersonal and

online services and their ability to complement or substitute each other in servicing

customers should also be looked into. Furthermore, e-service quality models need to

accommodate the whole service experience, including core service, facilitating

services, supporting services and user interface. Methods for capturing e-service

dissatisfaction, such as the critical incident technique (Meuter et al. 2000), will be

needed to fully understand the effects of quality of online services.

Focussed research on the impact of visual elements on customer evaluations is also

needed. For example, it has been proposed that cultural preferences affect the

evaluation of websites. To investigate this, the European Commission has set up a

project called Multilingual Digital Culture (MuDiCu), which e.g. attempts to identify

what makes websites attractive to different inhabitants of the European Community

(Vickers 2001). According to the article, websites could be set up to automatically

adapt language and colours to match users’ cultural preferences (Ibid). However, this

may only lead to another type of standardisation that does not reflect the preferences

of different customer segments within the community. Edvardsson et al. (2000)

describe another approach taken by a Swedish insurance company: on this website

visitors are offered a choice of different presentations of the services based on

customers’ preferred cognitive styles. Thus, in order to increase perceived service

quality, companies may need to segment their market and design distinct user

interfaces for different customer segments.

In addition, there is a need to understand other consumer responses and behaviours

in relation to e-services. Perceived value, satisfaction and commitment are essential

parts of e-service evaluations. If little is known on e-service quality, even less is

known about e-value or e-loyalty. Companies may currently be clustering their

websites with services that add little value for their target customers, while at the

same time they neglect services that could commit the customers more strongly to

the site. In a recent study, it was found that customers who reserved their hotel

rooms online were more loyal than customers who reserved rooms through other

channels (Shankar et al. 2000). Unfortunately it is not clear how loyalty was

24

measured in this study. The authors also hypothesised that loyalty may have been

higher because customers in the first place consider fewer options when making a

reservation online and secondly because of the high information content online.

However, it seems more likely that loyalty to a service provider precedes online

ordering, and not the other way around. In other words, more committed customers

are more likely to reserve a room online. They know what they want and then it is a

convenient way to make reservations. Future studies also need to look into online

commitment for different types of e-services, such as online retailers vs. information

providing sites.

Parasuraman and Grewal (2000) suggest that traditional service companies can use

websites to signal that they are keeping up with the times. We may already have

reached a point where customers take websites for granted. It is not enough to have

a website: it also has to be of good quality. Since websites vary in sophistication, an

interesting issue is, whether customer dissatisfaction with the website also has a

negative effect on commitment to the corresponding physical service outlets. We

imagine, that customers would actually be willing to switch traditional service

providers, in order to get better online services.

To conclude, we expect a rapid increase in the body of knowledge on customer

interaction with, evaluation of, and responses to e-services. We also expect that the

same research questions that have intrigued, and continue to be of interest to

traditional service researchers will be equally valid for e-services, and the

combination of both. Though there is a clear need to study the changes that occur

when customers move from traditional to online services, we also believe that much

of the accumulated knowledge from research on traditional services could be

adapted to e-services, and perhaps in the future even to mobile services (M-

services).

25

User interface

Facilitating services

Core service

Supporting services

E-service offering – a job board

• Articles• Education• Links to

other job boards

• Entertainment• Discussion

• Job postings

• Submitting a CV• Instructions to applicants

• Job offers• Functionality andattractiveness of the design

• Possibilities tocustomise/personalisethe design

Serviceoffer

Customer evaluation

E-service quality•Responsiveness•Reliability•Customisation•Assurance/Trust•User interface

Affective reactions•Positive•Negative

Figure 1 Service elements of a job board and customer’s cognitive and affective

reactions

26

Table 1 Background data, N= 240Item Percentage

Where do you usually getinformation about jobannouncements?(more than one optioncould be chosen)

This company’s WebsiteOther Internet recruitment firmsCompanies’ own Web pagesDaily papersJob centre

4552185220

How often do you visit thiscompany’s Website?

DailyWeeklyMonthlyLess often

7572215

How did you find thisWebsite?

Search engineThrough a friendAd in paperAd on notice boardBannerLink from other web page

1681931142

Have you got any job offersfrom this company

YesNo

9,590,5

Age Range: 17-58 yearsMean: 32 years

Gender MaleFemale

4852

Education 9 years basic educationVocational schoolSixth form (grammar school)InstitutePolytechnicUniversity, higher education

5136331528

Position at the moment UnemployedHome with childrenRetiredStudentWorkerOffice employeeLeading positionEntrepreneur

263-19142774

Region from whichemployment is sought

Greater Helsinki regionSouthern region of FinlandWestern region of FinlandEastern region of FinlandNorthern region of FinlandOther (e.g. anywhere in Finland)

3120205915

27

Table 2. Factor analysis with Varimax rotation of service element satisfaction

Factors andexplained variance

Factorloading

Cronbach’salpha

Factormean

Itemmean

Core service (18%)Number of open jobs

Quality of open jobs

0.76

0.82

0.64 3.1 3.0

3.1

Facilitating services (18%)

Registering as a job applicant

Instructions for applicants

0.83

0.73

0.76 3.7 3.7

3.7

Supporting services (34%)

Articles

Links to other sites of interest

Discussion column

Educational column

Entrepreneurial column

0.80

0.80

0.76

0.73

0.80

0.88 3.3 3.4

3.4

3.1

3.2

3.0Scale: 5-point scale (very disappointed, disappointed, neutral, satisfied, verysatisfied)

28

Table 3. Factor analysis with Varimax rotation on service quality items1)

Factorsand explained variance

Factorloading

Cronbach’salpha

Factormean

Itemmean

Site design and content (26%)

The outlook of the pages is good 0.72 0.84 3.6 3.6The design of the pages is clear 0.78 3.6Links are problem-free and the pagesdownload quickly

0.76 3.6

Information content is interesting 0.78 3.5Texts are easy to understand 0.66 3.9

Trust2) (18.5%)I can rely on the web pages functioningproperly

0.74 0.82 3.6 3,6

I can rely on the information that I givenot being misused

0.81 3.5

I can rely on the information remainingin the register

0.82 3.7

Empathy (13.5%)The company is interested in myindividual needs

0.84 0.69 3.0 2.9

Attention is paid to my feedback anddesires

0.80 3.3

Security/Privacy (13%)It is important for me to be able toregister anonymously

0.87 0.68 3.5 3.3

It is important that I can forbid thecompany from distributing information toemployers named by me

0.85 3.8

1) 5-point scale ranging from completely disagree to completely agree2) In the Finnish language the same word is used for reliability and trust

29

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