MEASURING B-to-B SERVICE QUALITY AND RELATIONSHIP PERFORMANCE: SCALE DEVELOPMENT AND MODEL TESTING

초록

Introduction Service quality is becoming an important business factor even in the business-to-business markets. Actually, the various service factors such as technical level, lead time and after-sales service play the role as the important factors regarding decision making on purchasing other than price in the trade of B2B market. Most researches that measure the service quality in service field have focused on B2C consumer goods and the limited number of researches are only being carried out regarding the service quality in B2B area. Initial studies in B2B borrowed the service quality scale that was made mainly based on consumer goods (Gounaris 2005) by partially using the measure of SERVQUAL that was developed and collected by Parasuraman et al. (1988). In this study, we tried to investigate two main objectives: (1) develop the measurement scale to facilitate assessments of B-to-B service quality and (2) investigate the structural model which deals with the relation between the service quality and B2B relationship performance. Considering that most previous researches about service quality were conducted in the business-to-consumer area, this study conceptualizes the various quality aspects of service that are considered in B2B market and proposes our research model which is the detailed quality measurement scale of B2B service. We developed a measurement scale called B-SERVQUAL for B2B service quality and tested research hypotheses and structural model.

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