New measurement scales for evaluating perceptions of the technology-mediated customer service experience

Service organizations are increasingly utilizing advanced information and communication technologies, such as the Internet, in hopes of improving the efficiency, cost-effectiveness, and/or quality of their customer-facing operations. More of the contact a customer has with the firm is likely to be with the back-office and, therefore, mediated by technology. While previous operations management research has been important for its contributions to our understanding of customer contact in face-to-face settings, considerably less work has been done to improve our understanding of customer contact in what we refer to as technology-mediated settings (e.g., via telephone, instant messaging (IM), or email). This paper builds upon the service operations management (SOM) literature on customer contact by theoretically defining and empirically developing new multi-item measurement scales specifically designed for assessing technology-mediated customer contact. Seminal works on customer contact theory and its empirical measurement are employed to provide a foundation for extending these concepts to technology-mediated contexts. We also draw upon other important frameworks, including the Service Profit Chain, the Theory of Planned Behavior, and the concept of media/information richness, in order to identify and define our constructs. We follow a rigorous empirical scale development process to create parsimonious sets of survey items that exhibit satisfactory levels of reliability and validity to be useful in advancing SOM empirical research in the emerging Internet-enabled back-office. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.