Service quality in e-commerce: Making the right call
Do our e-commerce companies follow and implement the globally accepted e-service quality guidelines? It seems like there remains areas where a lot of improvements can be made
"The e-commerce industry is a force that no investor can afford to ignore"
– Cushla Sherlock, Corporate Communications, Credit-Suisse
The growth of e-commerce in Bangladesh has gained momentum during the Covid-19 pandemic due to increasing consumer acceptance and preference. If we look at the e-commerce industry of Bangladesh, we will see that it is heading towards the stage of maturity within the next five years.
E-commerce has created many service avenues to explore for the entrepreneurs, like running businesses globally, delivering products directly to consumers without the involvement of the middlemen, comparative shopping, saving time and money, easy access to buyer-seller interaction, operation cost reduction, faster response to buyer/market demands, enabling global business avenues and making 24/7 operations easy.
Building effective e-service delivery strategies has become a formidable challenge for entrepreneurs in recent months. The ongoing pandemic has given rise to opportunities as well as challenges never faced before by online businesses all over the world.
A few of the most popular e-commerce approaches being employed over the years include omnichannel strategies, the delivery of real-time support with live functions, the encouraging of customers to come forward to avail services by themselves, in-app support for mobile users, the maintenance of consistency in service delivery, prompt responses to customer feedback, the successful tracking of the entire customer journey online, the use of large scale automation and customer retention.
"Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten" – Gucci
Like every other service business, the role of customer service quality has always been pivotal for e-commerce businesses. The framework for attaining the required quality of service in the e-commerce industry was developed to support online shoppers via online platforms throughout their lifetime cycle journey. It is mostly about offering help to customers right after they make an online purchase decision and offering solutions to their problems — while providing a seamless customer experience across platforms and channels.
As a result, providing excellent customer service is not only valuable but also essential for e-commerce success. E-commerce businesses will always find it simple to fulfil their customer's high expectations and earn their confidence by providing excellent customer services.
The best way to provide excellent customer service is to exceed their consumer's expectations and provide them with a 'wow' experience. Moreover, providing excellent customer service as a part of e-commerce initiatives may help e-businesses to stand out from the crowd.
The framework for ensuring e-service quality has gone through several changes over the years. But the question remains, in Bangladesh, do our e-commerce companies follow and implement the globally accepted e-service quality guidelines? Let us take a look at the widely used and applied e-service quality variables that ensure the successful attainment of e-service quality by online businesses.
The most common and widely accepted factors that influence the e-service quality are the ease of use, website design, reliability, system availability, privacy, responsiveness, empathy, trust, and the overall experience of the consumers. Now if we look at all these factors by keeping our country's perspective in mind, we may find areas where a lot of improvements can be made.
In the beginning, we can consider the ease of use factor. Ease of usage is defined by the extent to which an e-commerce user believes that using technology will improve the performance of his/her work. This ease or comfort is achieved by making the process of buying and selling products more efficient and easy.
Website design is the second most important factor in attaining e-service quality. Elements like colours, fonts, images, etc. help form an e-brand identity.
It has been observed that a large number of website materials or elements are directly or indirectly borrowed from the websites of developed countries. These websites may not be appropriate for the users of this country.
Henceforth, a common suggestion from the e-commerce customers of Bangladesh has always been to actively consider the culture, customs, and language of the land at the time of developing the e-commerce websites. In that regard, the inclusion of content in the Bangla language alongside English in popular e-commerce sites can also enhance the acceptability and accessibility of the e-commerce sites.
On the other hand, reliability requirements typically drive systems and network management designs for e-commerce solutions, along with networking, OS, and hardware choices. In general, it means that the system is available for operations and can be updated and maintained in a manner that continues to provide system availability.
Due to infrastructural issues and the unavailability of continuous and uninterrupted internet connections, an e-commerce site can become unreliable to its users.
Another factor that has an impact on e-commerce quality is system availability. When the systems become unavailable, the issues do not necessarily always rise from the e-commerce businesses.
In a lot of cases, the PCs and the gadgets used by the consumers are not of higher configurations or standards. As a result, the consumers can not enjoy the full functionality of the features of an e-commerce website.
Consequently, neglected consumers may begin doubting the credibility of the e-commerce sites while the issues could be easily resolved on the customer's end by understanding the system requirements to access the e-commerce sites.
Data privacy is one of the most widely raised concerns by well-informed e-consumers in Bangladesh. We need to understand that the growth of e-commerce and online businesses is a very recent phenomenon in our country.
Naturally, people are often reluctant in sharing personal information with e-commerce sites. Therefore, e-commerce sites should be designed in such a way that the need for confidential information is minimal.
The site managers must avoid the disclosures of private data to the other business information brokers. They must refrain from voluntarily uploading and sharing the consumer's private data with outsiders.
Customer responsiveness refers to the speed and quality at which your company provides customer service and communicates with its customers. If the e-commerce company takes too much time to respond to the customers' inquiries, feedback or comments then they might start to think that the company does not prioritise the customers' needs and wants.
Ultimately it might convey a signal to the customers that their concerns are merely an afterthought once the sale has been made. Answering customer inquiries, providing feedback to comments, and taking the complaints seriously can make an e-commerce platform more appealing to its target audience.
When our e-commerce companies design and deliver online services, do they put themselves in their customers' shoes? Particularly, regarding product delivery, most e-commerce companies heavily rely upon their distribution partners. The riders, management staff, the process of delivery, and logistical arrangements are regularly planned and executed by considering the availability of resources in hand, not thinking about the comfort and requirements of the target customers.
For example, we can mention the professional grooming and training of the delivery personnel who are making the deliveries of the products to the customers' doorsteps. It has been heard that the delivery person often lacked the proper training on interacting with customers directly and cordially.
So, on a broader scale, while e-commerce companies are putting a lot of effort into ensuring customer service during these trying times, a methodical approach to ensuring a high standard of customer service has yet to be established.
Trust, as a critical factor in e-commerce, is influenced predominantly by three sources: e-commerce reputation in general, the consumers and the specific e-commerce website. The impression of e-commerce as a whole has a strong impact on the willingness of consumers to trust online shopping.
So, e-commerce companies need to read the writing on the wall when it says that consumers are losing trust in their e-commerce sites. An easy way to gauge that trust is the volume of traffic on their sites.
At the end of the day, overall service quality comes out as the overall excellence or superiority of the service compared to another seller. So, e-commerce companies need to involve themselves in regular and rigorous consumer research to find out how their consumers are evaluating their overall e-service quality.
"In e-commerce, your price has to be better because the consumer has to take a leap of faith in your product" – Ashton Kutcher
Thinking beyond the obvious has always been a popular metaphor for e-business entrepreneurs and innovators. But recent major challenges faced by e-businesses globally require a new thought process, significantly beyond the obvious.
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Greater future breakthroughs in e-commerce and e-business will come from leaders who encourage thinking not only outside the box but also outside a whole building full of boxes, challenging the obvious.
Behind the obvious thought process is the hallmark of e-business establishments, whose structures are designed and centred around the common service delivery practices being introduced long before this 'new normal' scenario hit the ground. Once the architecture for the e-businesses was set, the inertia of not breaking the barriers of the common regular customer service practices created an obstacle for the e-business entrepreneurs to overlook the importance of service quality over the 'successful transaction paradigm' that ruled their business principles over the years.
Even change-oriented, beyond the obvious thinkers, took online organisation and e-industry structures for granted. They paid most of their attention to similar-looking competitors serving in the market.
They have been focusing on enhancing the use of existing capabilities rather than developing new solutions to ensure deliverance of service quality by attaining successful transactions.
To foster innovation and transformation in attaining a high quality of e-service quality, e-businesses should focus more on impact, not input. Identifying unsolved problems, mapping the wider system influencing results and determining weak links to fill in the gaps in the total service delivery module of the e-businesses is the right way forward.
But to do all that effectively, they must first start to think beyond the obvious and start ignoring the inevitable. I guess, now the time has come when e-commerce practitioners need to ask themselves whether to follow the popular e-service quality models or focus on ensuring the quality of their services by keeping the new normal scenario in mind where the quality of the service will rule over the common e-service factors in place.
The author is an academician, columnist and a Service Quality Management (SQM) consultant. He can be reached at tazizdab@yahoo.com
