Abstract
The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of avatars’ utilitarian and hedonic values on the different dimensions of e-service quality. Despite the existence of many studies focusing on the impact of the avatar on user’s online experience, there is a lack of research on the effect of avatars’ values on the different dimensions of websites’ perceived quality. We asked respondents to interact with an avatar and then fill in our questionnaire. We applied this process to 8 different service companies’ websites with an avatar already integrated. We received 945 questionnaires back. In order to measure e-service quality, we used WEBQUAL. As we had several latent variables, we used partial least squares (PLS), a variance-based structural equation modeling method. Results show that the utilitarian and hedonic values of the avatar increase significantly the perception of the website’s quality. The utilitarian value of the avatar impacts 9 of the 10 dimensions of e-service quality. The hedonic value impacts 5 of the 10 dimensions of e-service quality. The results of this study are relevant to the academic world, as we identified that the utilitarian value of an avatar can impact nearly all dimensions of WEBQUAL. Our results can also have immediate and direct implications for companies who want to improve a specific dimension of their website by the use of an avatar. Moreover, this study will be useful for developers of online agents in order to adjust the knowledge of their avatars to clients’ and users’ needs.
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