A Research On Evaluating E-Service Quality In The SaaS Model And Its Relationship With Customer Loyalty

The rapid development of information technology, with the application softwaredevelops to mature, a complete innovative model of software applications——SaaS(Software as a Service) as an irreversible tendency impact to the software industry. SaaS will bring new opportunities to the development of China's software industry, and also will bring new ideas for the enterprise informationization. However, behind the warming trend of SaaS increasing, the industry crises continue to emerge, such as its online service quality assurance is to bear the brunt of the problems. Therefore, how to respond quickly to China's development of SaaS bottlenecks encountered on the road, and leading SaaS industry to healthy and steady growth, which is worth studing as a research topic.In addition, the academic study about the theory of e-service quality is still at the initial stage, and the concept of defining and measuring, the new scale development and validation, and the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction, customer loyalty still exist many differences and uncertainty. For the practical and theoretical background, we do the research about the e-service quality of SaaS companies by interviews, research, questionnaires, mathematical statistics, structural equation modeling analysis and a series of research methods to explore the dimensions of SaaS-E-QUAL (including the items system). We also find out its interaction with the customer loyalty relationship. Our research goal is to help SaaS companies to gain competitive advantage from the customer perspective and to provide a theoretical reference and guide to action.Through the empirical study, we get the conclusions of the study as below:Firstly, in the present study, the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to assess the SaaS-E-QUAL instrument dimensionality, reliability and validity, and apply the SaaS-E-QUAL instrument into Chinese SaaS Industry. We found that the adapted SaaS-E-QUAL instrument is also a valid and valuable tool to measure e-service quality of SaaS Companies. The E-Service Quality of SaaS is primarily made up of 6 dimensions and 23 items, which only the 5 dimensions have direct or indirect impact on client loyalty.Secondly, find out the concrete interaction bewteen the six dimensions of SaaS-E-QUAL.Thirdly, we explored the concrete interaction that how the six dimensions of SaaS-E-QUAL to impact customer loyalty through the middle variable (customer satisfaction).And last our study provides some useful insights and guidance for managers to measure and improve E-Service Quality.