Measuring The E-commerce Customer Service Life Cycle

ABSTRACT This paper describes the preliminary conceptual development of an instrument to measure the ability of an e-commerce site to meet the service aspects of the Customer Service Life Cycle (CSLC) through the use of information technology (IT). In light of the emergence of e-commerce, there is a pressing need for the evaluation of IT-supported services from a customer service perspective. The CSLC purports to be a source of competitive advantage through the differentiation of service offerings (Ives and Learmonth 1984). The CSLC framework can also serve as a basis for the strategic development of interorganizational IT applications. While the CSLC has been discussed in the information systems literature since 1984, little empirical work has been done to develop measures of its constructs of interest 1. INTRODUCTION Ives and Learmonth first proposed the Customer Service Life Cycle (CSLC) in 1984 as a framework for applying information technology (IT) to externally oriented, customer-focused applications. The CSLC is based primarily on the extant knowledge that customers follow a "birth to death" cycle when dealing with a supplier's product or service. Broadly, a customer first establishes a need and characteristics of a product or service. She then acquires the product, possesses it and at some point returns, disposes or otherwise discontinues ownership. A visual depiction of the CSLC is shown in Figure 1 (Ives and Mason 1990). Ives and Learmonth posited that IT could provide the necessary tools and infrastructure for a company to serve its customers across the breadth of the life cycle. IT can be applied to the role of assisting customers identify the right products, managing purchased products or speeding the return of an item. Amazon.com, for example, uses collaborative filtering to recommend books of potential interest to a customer. These may well be products that the customer never before perceived a need for until presented with the targeted choice. The vast majority of e-commerce sites provide electronic "shopping carts" to assist the customer in managing the order process and then determining payment. Symantec's anti-virus software maintains contact with a customer's computer to assure both the software and the library of virus definitions are up to date to assure maximum protection. Symantec automatically notifies the customer when either the software or the virus definitions have upgrades available.