Online Transportation Services Guideline for Service Quality NOOR HABIBAH ARSHAD, FAUZIAH AHMAD, NORJANSALIKA JANOM, AZLINAH MOHAMED Faculty of Information Technology & Quantitative Sciences Universiti Teknologi MARA 40450 Shah Alam, Selangor MALAYSIA habibah@tmsk.uitm.edu.my, fauziah@tmsk.uitm.edu.my, norjan@tmsk.uitm.edu.my azlinah@tmsk.uitm.edu.my Abstract: Over the past years, at an increasing pace, customer satisfaction has been an emphasis in most organization especially those in the service industry. Service quality becomes the major focus on achieving customer satisfy action and, over the long run, customer retention. Responding to the notion, many retailers begin to appreciate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) concept and constantly improve the quality of services that they offered to fulfill the customers expectations and satisfactions. Currently, the practice has also extended to the online retailers, both ‘brick and mortar’ and ‘click and mortar’ companies. The CRM concept has broaden to include online customers and services. This study is undertaken to explore the internet service quality in online service industry, particularly in e-ticketing of transportation service. Web observations were performed to identify the major and significant determinants of quality of internet services. By using electronic CRM (e-CRM) model as reference in observation, it is found that appearance and linkages are two important determinants that should be used when measuring the quality of internet services. Through the findings, a guideline of the transportation websites incorporating important features of e-CRM is developed. Keywords: - Internet Retailing; Electronic Customer Relationship Management; Service Quality; Customer Satisfaction; E-ticketing 1 Introduction Internet retailing (also known as B2C, or Business- to-Consumer e-commerce) is a Web-enabled interface between a company and their target consumer for selling products and services on the Web, with the facility of online payment. The Internet has been provided with a platform to deliver CRM function on web, which is known as electronic customer relationship management (E-CRM). One of the primary activities of e-CRM is the customer service on the web. Since customer service quality is increasingly recognized as an important aspect of Internet retailing, many practitioners and academicians focused on how to improve online services to attract potential customers and on how to retain current customers. Many organizations have encountered problems and challenges in furnishing Internet service quality. Customers are still hesitant to make online purchasing due to problems associated with security, reliability, threat of fraud, and etc. Information search and purchasing on the Internet also require a level of computer literacy not required in a traditional retail space. Without this level of technical literacy, consumers can become frustrated and purchases maybe aborted [9]. For transportation, the industry has moved a step further in providing services to its customers when they are able to replicate some of their business processes into online. Becoming an internet retailer is a huge transformation and it has affected the organizations’ processes from marketing to customer services. The internet retailer needs to convince its customers that they would neither experience much difficulty conducting online transactions nor that there will be differences conducting transaction offline. This is a huge liability. Not only that they have to invest in the technology and infrastructure, the mindset of the employees and the management need also to be shifted. Other than that, organizations that involve with providing online services also need to be able to recognize the needs of their customers and the hurdles that thwart them. Ability to incorporate e- CRM features into their websites is among the important things that every online business must address. These features are included on the website to communicate and deliver services to the customers. Better than that, the features also become the subject of quality, measuring the excellence of internet services offered online. It is, therefore, important for organizations to identify prominent WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on BUSINESS and ECONOMICS Noor Habibah, Fauziah Ahmad, Norjansalika Janom and Azlinah Mohamed ISSN: 1109-9526 Issue 5, Volume 5, May 2008 201