Management of technology and quality in electronic consumer service operations: Applications to electronic food retailing

The emergence of electronic consumer services poses questions for managers and researchers about typical configurations of products and process technologies used to design and deliver electronic services, and how these configurations relate to service quality and customer value. Thus, the research question underlying my dissertation is: What are the dimensions of operations used to deliver electronic consumer service products, and how do these dimensions relate to the service quality and customer value delivered in electronic consumer services? The first stage of the dissertation develops a conceptual framework for electronic service operations from an electronic service product typology and an electronic service process typology. The typologies are combined together to construct a product-process matrix for electronic consumer services. The matrix facilitates the development of propositions that relate positions and paths on the matrix to customer value. The second stage empirically examines the product and process typologies. Using data on product and process technology variables from electronic food retailers, we develop product and process taxonomies for electronic services. In the final stage, we analyze whether and how product configurations and process configurations are related to service quality and customer value. The taxonomies provide each retailer with a position along each dimension of the product-process matrix. We use the positions to examine whether product and process configurations are independent of each other, and whether there exists a product-process matrix diagonal along which retailers position themselves. The configurations exhibit a positive and significant correlation, which indicates that a diagonal configuration exists within the product-process matrix. The results also show that many retailers are positioned away from the diagonal, and suggest that further analysis should examine the relationship between matrix positions and service quality. Using service quality data for a subset of the study sample, we explore whether service quality is associated with product and process configurations and their interactions, with distances of individual retailers from ideal configuration profiles, and with positions on or off of the matrix diagonal. The results suggest that service quality levels tend to improve along the process configurations, and tend to be higher along the product-process matrix diagonal.