A Taxonomy of Service Standards and a Modification for E-Business

Abstract

Against the background of theoretical typologies of service standards, a survey among European service companies addressed the question, in which service-related categories formal and informal standards are implemented. Relying on the assessment of the importance of the various service-related standardisation aspects, it was possible to identify a taxonomy of service standards containing five clusters of service standards “Service Management”, “Service Employee”, “Service Delivery”, “Customer Interaction”, and “Data Flows and Security”, which correspond very closely to the ex ante applied typology derived from the literature. The analysis of the subsample of companies active in e-commerce reveals significant differences, which reflect their special needs caused by the distance to their customers.