About

With increasing competition in the E-marketplace, generating experiences that exceeded the customer’s expectations of E-Commerce became important in order to acquire and then retain customers. A customer’s experience with E‑Commerce environments extended beyond the interaction with the website, including the delivery of products, post-sales support, and so on.

Perceptions of Value

It was this total experience that influenced the customer’s perceptions of value and service quality. Our research goal was to investigate how Customer Relationship Management (CRM) strategies could be incorporated into the design of E-Commerce. In our cross-disciplinary EPSRC-funded research programme in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and CRM, we developed an empirically-grounded Service Quality Toolbox.

Service Quality Toolbox

The Service Quality Toolbox consisted of the following research outputs: a customer-centred design process for the design and evaluation of E-Commerce environments (based on the standards ISO 13407 and ISO 9001), a model of purchase and consumption of customer behavior, an evaluation instrument called E-SEQUAL comprising CRM and usability heuristics, a generic set of customer personas, and a set of recommended techniques for requirements elicitation and evaluation of E-Commerce environments.

Team

Dr. Shailey Minocha
Liisa H. Dawson

Publications

Book Chapter

Shailey Minocha, Liisa Dawson, Ann Blandford and Nicola Millard, ‘Providing Value to Customers in E-Commerce environments: The Customer’s Perspective‘, in the book ‘Contemporary Research in E-Marketing’, to be published by IDEA Group, PA, USA, April 2004.

Organisation of a Workshop

  • Shailey Minocha and Liisa Dawson, ‘Exploring the Total Customer Experience: Usability Evaluations of (B2C) E-Commerce Environments‘, 1-day workshop at INTERACT 2003, http://computing.open.ac.uk/interact2003/ 

Conference / Workshop Papers

  • Shailey Minocha, Pat Hall and Liisa Dawson, ‘Localisation Challenges in Usability and Customer Relationship Management in (B2C) E-Commerce Environments‘, Proceedings of SCALLA 2004 Crossing the Digital Divide, Shaping Technologies to meet human needs, January 5-7, 2004. 
  • Shailey Minocha, Liisa Dawson, Ann Blandford and Dave Roberts, ‘The Customer’s Perspective: Sociological Accounts of E-Commerce Encounters‘, in Isais, P. & Karmarkar, N., (eds.) Proceedings of the IADIS, International Conference, WWW/Internet 2003, IADIS Press, 69-76.
  • Shailey Minocha, Nicola Millard, and Liisa Dawson, “Integrating Customer Relationship Strategies in (B2C) E-Commerce Environments“, Proceedings of INTERACT 2003- Bringing the Bits together, Zurich, Switzerland, 2003.
  • Shailey Minocha and Pat Hall, Customer Relationship Management in (B2C) E-Commerce Environments: Challenges in Localisation, presented at Workshop 2, ‘Putting Theory into Practice: How to apply cross-cultural differences to user interface design?’ at Interact 2003, Bringing the Bits Together. Ninth IFIP TC13, International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Zurich, Switzerland, 1-5 September 2003.
  • Shailey Minocha, Liisa Dawson, Marian Petre and Sunila Modi, Usability Evaluations of (B2C) E-Commerce Environments, presented in Workshop 6, Interact 2003, – Exploring the Total Customer Experience: Usability Evaluations of (B2C) E-Commerce Environments, INTERACT 2003, Zurich, Switzerland, 1-5 September 2003.
  • Liisa Dawson, Shailey Minocha and Marian Petre, ‘E-SEQUAL: Evaluating (B2C) E-Commerce Environments across the Service Encounter‘, presented in Workshop 6 ‘Exploring the Total Customer Experience: Usability Evaluations of (B2C) E-Commerce Environments, INTERACT 2003, Zurich, Switzerland, 1-5 September 2003.
  • Shailey Minocha, Tim French and Liisa Dawson, ‘Cultural Attractors of Usability and Customer Relationship Management in (B2C) E-Commerce Environments‘, BCS-HCI Culture Workshop, Greenwich University, June 18th, 2003. Liisa Dawson, Shailey Minocha and Marian Petre, “Exploring the Total Customer Experience in E-Commerce Environments”, e-Society 2003, an IADIS (International Association for the Development of Information Society) International Conference, Lisbon, Portugal, June 3rd-6th, 2003.

Earlier related research conducted by some of our project members can be found at: http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/CREWS/.