Customer Satisfaction in E-Commerce
In Proceedings of the 17th IEE UK Teletraffic Symposium, Dublin, Ireland, May 16-18, 2001 QUANTIFYING CUSTOMER SATISFACTION WITH E-COMMERCE WEBSITES Hubert Graja and Jennifer McManis1 Abstract
E-commerce is an increasingly significant part of the global economy. Users of E-commerce Web sites often have high expectations for the quality of service, and if those expectations are not met, the next site is only a click away. A number of performance problems have been observed for E-commerce Web sites, and much work has gone into characterising the performance of Web servers and Internet applications. However, the customers of E-commerce Web sites are less well studied. In this work, we discuss a way of assessing satisfaction for different customer types with a Web site according to various different parameters. Individual measures may be scaled for simple comparison, and combined to give an overall satisfaction rating. This methodology is applied to three Irish E-Commerce Web sites.
1) Introduction
The World Wide Web is one of the most important Internet services, and has been largely responsible for the phenomenal growth of the Internet in recent years. An increasingly popular and important Web-based activity is ECommerce, in which various types of financial transactions are carried out or facilitated using the Web. It is widely expected that E-Commerce activity will continue to grow and that it will be a significant component of the global economy in the near future. A number of performance problems in E-Commerce systems have been observed, mainly due to heavier-thananticipated loads and the consequent inability to satisfy customer requirements. This has resulted in a lot of work attempting to characterise the performance of Web servers and Internet applications e.g. [1]−[4]. However the customers of these E-Commerce systems are less well studied. Some surveys show considerable dissatisfaction with current E-Commerce and Web servers; for example, it has been
E-commerce is an increasingly significant part of the global economy. Users of E-commerce Web sites often have high expectations for the quality of service, and if those expectations are not met, the next site is only a click away. A number of performance problems have been observed for E-commerce Web sites, and much work has gone into characterising the performance of Web servers and Internet applications. However, the customers of E-commerce Web sites are less well studied. In this work, we discuss a way of assessing satisfaction for different customer types with a Web site according to various different parameters. Individual measures may be scaled for simple comparison, and combined to give an overall satisfaction rating. This methodology is applied to three Irish E-Commerce Web sites.
1) Introduction
The World Wide Web is one of the most important Internet services, and has been largely responsible for the phenomenal growth of the Internet in recent years. An increasingly popular and important Web-based activity is ECommerce, in which various types of financial transactions are carried out or facilitated using the Web. It is widely expected that E-Commerce activity will continue to grow and that it will be a significant component of the global economy in the near future. A number of performance problems in E-Commerce systems have been observed, mainly due to heavier-thananticipated loads and the consequent inability to satisfy customer requirements. This has resulted in a lot of work attempting to characterise the performance of Web servers and Internet applications e.g. [1]−[4]. However the customers of these E-Commerce systems are less well studied. Some surveys show considerable dissatisfaction with current E-Commerce and Web servers; for example, it has been
References: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. Nakamura et al, `ENMA: the WWW Server Performance Measurement System via Packet Monitoring ', INET99. Cottrell et al, `Tutorial on Internet Monitoring and PingER at SLAC ' available from http://www.slac.stanford.edu/comp/net/wan-mon/tutorial.html Kalidindi and Zekauskas, `Surveyor: An Infrastructure for Internet Performance Measurements ', INET99. Hava and Murphy, `Performance Measurement of World Wide Web Servers ' Proc. of 16th UK Teletraffic Symposium, May 2000. http://www.ecai.ie/usability_online.htm Graja and McManis, ‘Modelling User Interactions with E-Commerce Services’, to be presented at ICN01, Colmar, France, July 2001. Bouch, Kuchinsky, and Bhatti, ‘Quality is in the Eye of the Beholder: Meeting Users’ Requirements for Internet Quality of Service’, HP technical report HPL-2000-4, http://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/2000/HPL-2000-4.html Web Performance Incorporated, http://www.Webperfcenter.com