Information Technology Mediated Customer Service: A Functional Perspective

Abstract

Companies can use information technology not only to conduct transactions with their customers but also to provide them with valuable functionalities before, during, and after those transactions, such as recommendations on what products to buy or to track product delivery. The e-Business environment provides a particularly fertile ground for leveraging IT resources to provide functionality. Although the general perceptions of online service quality and self-service technologies have been extensively studied, there has not yet been a through investigation into the specific functionality that IT can provide for delivering services that supplement a core product offering. This paper examines the role of IT as a service delivery mechanism. Drawing on a customer service life cycle framework and the concept of supplementary service, we propose and operationalize the construct of functionality: the broad array of IT applications that can enhance a customer’s experience with a company beyond just the core offering. Functionality focuses on specific IT-based service tools as opposed to broad perceptions of service (e.g., service quality) and so targets a key IT artifact. A crosssectional survey of current e-Business customers was used to validate the multidimensional functionality construct as well as to test a theoretical model relating functionality to the consequences of satisfaction, perceived website usefulness, and continued website usage. The results support that functionality is not only a conceptually valid construct but also one that is highly regarded by e-Business customers.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 24 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.