This study sought to assess the quality of online customer services at a Telecommunication company in Zimbabwe. Data was collected through an online and physical questionnaire and the researcher adopted a mixed approach. The data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The study was carried out using systematic random sampling. The study shows that the level of quality of online customer service of the organization is good and there are four main dimensions that have a high impact on online service quality, and these are website design, security and privacy, empathy, ease of use, and fulfillment. However, the study also noted that although the organization's online service quality was rated generally satisfactory, they need to look at three dimensions that need significant improvement that is, responsiveness, reliability, security, and privacy.
Top1. Introduction
The shift towards digital customer service was already underway before COVID-19, and it has only been accelerated by the pandemic challenges (Olson, 2022). Owing to this fast-tracked shift, the delivery of services, before and after-sales support has been pushed to electronic channels and organizations are faced with a challenge to address the quality of online customer service. According to LaBerge et al (2020), the McKinsey Global Survey of executive’s companies has accelerated the digitization of their customer and supply-chain interactions and of their internal operations by three to four years. Also, the share of digital or digitally enabled products in their portfolios has accelerated by a shocking seven years. This shows that digital adoption has taken a quantum leap at both the organizational and industry level.
Quality is a dynamic state associated with products, services, people, processes, and environments that meet or exceed expectations and helps produce superior value (Goetsch & Davis, 2014). The concept of quality accommodates a range of perspectives it can be defined from, such as the product perspective, freedom from deficiencies, customer perspective, value perspective, and from customer’s perspective (Martin, Elg, & Gremyr, 2020). From the product perspective, it is defined as the degree to which a product meets the design specifications offering a satisfaction factor that fulfills all the expectations that a customer wants (Diaz, 2014). In this regard, quality is accomplished by a strict and consistent commitment to certain standards to achieve uniformity of a product to satisfy specific customer requirements (Diaz, 2014). The value-based approach regards quality as relative to price and according to this view, the buyer’s perception of value represents a mental trade-off between the quality or benefits perceived relative to the price paid (Claessense, 2018). The freedom from deficiencies perspective defines quality as a measure of excellence or a state of being free from defects, deficiencies, and significant variations and is brought about by strict and consistent commitment to certain standards that achieve uniformity of a product to satisfy specific customer or user requirements (Himanshu, 2019).
The push for organizations to concentrate on quality is not new. In the early 1920s statistical processes for quality control were developed by Walter Shewhart at Bell Laboratories (Sharma, 2012). These processes were refined, and they were implemented during World War II to control the production of war materials in the USA. Post-World War II companies in the USA were not bothered about quality issues because of the boom in demand of production as pent-up consumer demand fueled exceptionally strong economic growth (Moffat, 2020). This was not the same in Japan where two American quality gurus Dr. Joseph Juran and Dr. Edward Deming taught Japanese companies methods of controlling quality and the methods heavily relied on monitoring errors in production and finding ways of reducing them (Singh, 2019). Singh (2019) further stated that, this quality movement that was introduced in Japan was to eliminate variations in goods produced and it introduced companywide quality control (CWQC) which encouraged the participation of employees at all levels and departments.