Marlene Amorim

By Sandra Maria Correia Loureiro and Marlene Amorim

Online platforms (such as websites, blogs, social networks, crowdsourcing) enable consumers to interact with companies and brands in new ways. This chapter is the first attempt to go further and analyse how perceived fashion website quality, social influence and recommendation, credibility, and experience influence fashion consumer behaviour, considering performance expectancy as the core element of online trust, satisfaction and word-of-mouth. The proposed model is tested in the context of the fashion industry. Data comprises a sample of generation Y users of fashion websites to get information and buy clothes. In order to collect data, convenience mall-intercept sampling (Lisbon city centre area) served to draw a broad cross-section of consumers. Researchers used tablets to be used by consumers to answer the online survey. The final sample consisted of 312 participants. The instruments employed were adapted from previous studies and pilot-tested with a group of master’s students to verify the clarity of meaning and comprehension. Findings reveal the stronger influence of perceived quality and experience on the performance expectancy. Performance expectancy, in turn, exercises a positive effect on satisfaction and word-of-mouth.

Part of the book: E-Business

By Marlene Amorim and Mário Rodrigues

In recent years the volume and the reach of available online content in the form of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has grown at an unprecedented pace. eWOM exerts an important influence for consumption decisions of consumers, and is acknowledged to be more accessible and trustworthy than other commercial information provided by companies by means of advertising and sales. The sophistication and widespread of communication technologies is making the volume of information released online by customers to become overwhelming. For consumers and for business managers alike, making sense of the available information is a challenge that needs to be met urgently in order to keep the pace with the expectations of consumers whom, as engaged providers of feedback require their observations to be taken into account. This advances with a contribution to support the development of methods for the analysis and visualization information from online sources, by adapting an importance-performance analysis for identifying salient quality attributes from eWOM, offering an efficient approach for extracting information and identifying priorities for service improvement.

Part of the book: Consumer Behavior and Marketing

By Carla Marisa Ferreira Gomes, Marlene Paula Castro Amorim and Mário Jorge Ferreira Rodrigues

Online patient reviews can offer a rich information source to users of healthcare services, as well as for hospital management and quality monitoring. Whereas in recent years the volume of online patient reviews has been consistently growing, organizations still lack standardized approaches and tools to allow for the systematic monitoring of users’ online comments. Therefore, managers are lagging in the ability to make use of such data from patients’ voices for improving the quality of the services provided. If organizations fail to develop the right capabilities to consider users’ online reviews and feedback, they risk not only to miss important quality failure alerts, as wells as to frustrate their customers’ expectations for service and attention. In this chapter, we present a qualitative analysis of patients’ reviews for healthcare services in Portugal, building on a sample of data extracted from Google for the year of 2019. The chapter reports the major quality management themes addressed by hospital users in their online expressions and offers some guidelines to support a structured analysis and visualization of results from online users’ word of mouth data.

Part of the book: e-Services