Service marketing evaluation generally includes the evaluation of service quality and service benefits. Qualitative evaluation is used to understand customers’ subjective perception of service quality, understand customer service expectations, and provide feedback on the effectiveness of service marketing strategies. Quantitative evaluation is used to understand the actual benefits brought by service marketing strategies.
Service quality evaluation must be evaluated from the customer’s perspective rather than the merchant’s perspective. There are multiple customer touchpoints in the cross-border e-commerce transaction process, so customers’ perception of service quality is a comprehensive perception of multiple factors. It is recommended to evaluate the service quality of cross-border e-commerce from five dimensions: reliability, credibility, responsiveness, accessibility, and tangibility.
(1) Reliability. Reliability is the ability of merchants to accurately fulfill their promised services. This requires merchants to be able to fulfill their previous commitments on goods, logistics, after-sales services, etc., complete service tasks on time, and ensure that service results are consistent with customer expectations.
(2) Credibility. Credibility refers to the credit of the merchant perceived by customers, which is closely related to the sincere service attitude and professional service level of customer service personnel. If merchants and customers establish a trusting relationship, the sales completion rate will be greatly improved. (3) Responsiveness. Responsiveness emphasizes the speed and willingness of merchants to respond to customer issues, generally including the speed of replying to inquiries and the efficiency of solving transaction-related problems.
(4) Accessibility. Accessibility means that merchants consider customer requirements in terms of service time and other aspects, and provide customers with care and personalized services, so that customers can feel that merchants understand and pay attention to customer needs.
(5) Tangibility. Tangibility emphasizes the visual interaction factors that customers actually come into contact with during the transaction process. Due to the intangibility of services, customers often perceive the service level through some visible and tangible factors. Therefore, tangible display parts such as store visual interaction and packages will affect customers’ perception of service quality. After clarifying the service quality evaluation dimensions, we need to master the method of evaluating service quality.
In the process of using the scale, we need to pay attention to the following points
(1) The evaluation dimensions of the scale can be adjusted according to the business environment of merchants in different industries and at different levels
(2) The scale can provide direction for improving service levels. For example, measure the service levels of two different merchants, find the key dimensions that have a greater impact on customer perception of service quality, and correspond to specific service marketing measures to optimize service marketing strategies.
(3) The measurement results should be treated differently. Classify the scores of different customers and evaluate group characteristics, such as customer loyalty and value level, so that resources can be allocated to high-value customer groups to improve the satisfaction of this customer group.
(4) The scale is a qualitative and subjective measurement from the customer’s perspective, and does not take into account objective evaluation indicators, such as actual response time, inquiry conversion rate, etc. Therefore, it can be combined with quantitative indicators for comprehensive evaluation.