| Abstrakt: |
Convenience is an increasingly important value component for consumers of services, and a better understanding of service convenience will allow companies to design more successful convenience strategies. Literature streams that address the topic of convenience include studies related to time and energy expenditure (e.g., Hornik 1984; Anderson and Shugan 1991), the consumer waiting literature (e.g., Hui and Tse 1996; Taylor 1994), and examinations of consumer convenience orientation (e.g., Nickols and Fox 1983; Reilly 1982). The measurement of convenience has received little attention in the literature, and to our knowledge, there is no developed scale of convenience that addresses multiple, defined dimensions. This study empirically examines core components of a conceptual model of service convenience, which is defined as consumers' time and effort perceptions related to buying or using a service. The model proposes that consumers' perceived time and effort costs encompass five defining types of convenience — decision, access, transaction, benefit, and post-benefit (Berry, Seiders, and Grewal 2002). Our focus is on the measurement of service convenience: developing a scale that will enable us to assess the relationship between each of the five service convenience dimensions and two key outcomes: value perceptions and behavioral intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
