A Framework for Managing Quality in the E-Service System

With the phenomenal growth of electronic services, assessing and managing e-service quality have become increasingly important to e-service providers and consumers alike. Despite the concurrent growth of online e-service quality rating sites and extensive academic and practitioner literatures reflecting a variety of quality definitions and service quality dimensions, no comprehensive framework for assessing and managing e-service quality exists. In this paper we present a systematic approach, based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML), for modeling e-services that identifies the direct and indirect entities contributing to an electronic service experience and defines them in terms of their attributes and service transactions. We then link this process-oriented model for electronic services to quality dimensions from (i) academic quality frameworks and (ii) practitioner e-service quality rating systems. By taking a process-oriented (i.e., operations) approach to modeling e-service quality, this study identifies existing and potential operational levers for managing and improving e-service quality. Examples of applications of the framework are discussed.