The revolution in technology has completely transformed the way business organizations operate, serve and retain their customers. The new phenomenon of information technology has set in motion a new paradigm in the services sector for providing better services. Due to the intangibility of services, it has always been challenging to satisfy the customers, and hence to measure and rate the service quality. As the information technology has taken over most aspects of our life, the delivery of services has transformed from traditional to electronic channels making its quality even more challenging to measure and maintain. The service quality has now become e-service quality. The previously established models in service quality have been rendered less useful due to the varying nature of traditional services and e-services. This resulted in the need of either developing new scales or refining the old service quality scales to suit the e-channels of service delivery. The SERVQUAL and related scales were refined and scales like E-SQ, E-SQual-ERec-SQual were established for measuring electronic service quality in today’s technology based era of service delivery.  This paper aims to study the evolution of e-service quality and describes the transition of service quality to e-service quality.

Keywords

Service Quality, E-service Quality, Information technology, SERVQUAL, E-SQual-ERec-SQual