mystery shopping, we assembled the prominent phenomena of interest into a general research model. As our observations mirrored the prevailing general critique of their quality found in the literature, we were interested to find out whether they would be assessed equally by investment advisory stakeholders. Would FSP advisors and managers be aware of existing issues and their clients’ perceptions and expectations?
A model incorporating such conceptions can be found in Zeithaml et al.’s [1990] gaps model of service quality (SERVQUAL), which provides the structural base of our research model depicted in Figure 6-2. The gaps relate to discrepancies in the clients’ expectations and perceptions of service quality (Gap 1), sales managers incorrectly estimating the clients’
expectations (Gap 2) as well as further gaps between the sales managements’
specification of quality standards, their communication to the customer and their actual implementation. According to our main phenomena of interest, we decided to focus on the first two gaps and extend the model with further stakeholders to assess their estimation of client expectation; thus, in addition to sales managers, we decided to interview advisors (actually providing the service to the client) and IT managers (being responsible for providing supportive IT tools in service provision).
The gaps model features a multi-item scale for measuring consumer perception of service quality [Parasuraman et al. 1988]. Perceived quality is conceptualized as the individual’s judgment about a service’s overall excellence and results from comparing expectations with perceptions of performance [Parasuraman et al. 1988:15]. The SERVQUAL scale measures quality expectations and perceptions along five dimensions [Parasuraman et al. 1988:23; Zeithaml et al. 1990:26]:
Reliability: correct and dependable performance of the service
Assurance: knowledge, courtesy and trustworthiness of employees
Responsiveness: willingness of immediate and attentive service provision
Empathy: individual attention in respect of the customer’s specific needs
Tangibles: the service firm’s exteriors, e.g., physical facilities, appearance of personnel
As depicted in Figure 6-2, we conceptualize the advisory process as the main interface between client and FSP and use it as a common frame of reference to investigate the gaps of expectations and perceptions. In addition to the general service quality, we were also interested in further aspects, such as the actual implementation of advisory processes and their IT support.
Figure 6-2: General research model, partly based on Zeithaml et al. [1990:46]
Zeithaml et al. [1990] find word-of-mouth communications, personal needs, past experience, and external communications of the service provider to be key determinants of the client’s service expectation. For our purpose, we decided to put an emphasis on the role of the client’s information (seeking) behavior in order to investigate the role of advisory services in her decision making process and gain insights on her rationales of using investment advice.
While the SERVQUAL model offers one of the most complete conceptualizations of service quality [Nyeck et al. 2002], it has been often criticized in respect of its underlying dimensions and their stability [Buttle 1996; Nyeck et al. 2002]. As presented above, we thus based our research on an adapted SERVQUAL model (Figure 6-2). Our main investigations of advisory quality were based on self-defined dimensions we found to be most relevant in the first research phases (e.g., personalization and assurance).
Furthermore, we constructed own metrics for these dimensions, which showed high reliability (see also Section 6.3.4). We only used the original SERVQUAL dimensions and metrics to measure the respondents’ perceived relative importance of different service aspects (see above).
In a next step, we conducted focus group discussions in order to deepen our understanding of our framework’s main topics as well as validating the usefulness of their conceptualizations. Focus group discussions are frequently used for marketing research on consumer attitudes and motivations [Flick 2007:259–263; Lunt and Livingstone 1996]. Focus groups explicitly use the dynamics of group interactions to generate insights on the topics of interest. As such, it may be used for discovery and as a source of ideas for quantitative testing [Lunt and Livingstone 1996:80], where salient dimensions emerging from group discussions may be used as a precursor for quantitative research.
Typically, but depending on the context and research goals, multiple focus groups are applied on the same topic to achieve “saturation” regarding potential contributions – as a rule of thumb, Lunt and Livingstone [1996:83]
state that “one should continue to run new groups until the last group has nothing new to add, but merely repeats previous contributions”. While the number of participants per focus group is a compromise between manageability and idea diversity of the groups [Morgan 1997], group sizes mostly vary from 6 to 10 participants [Lunt and Livingstone 1996:82].
For our research, we conducted two major focus groups to discuss our phenomena of interests from a client’s perspective. The first focus group was conducted in May 2008 with 17 employees of a medium size Swiss consultancy company, the second in Sep 2008 with 11 alumni of information systems studies at University of Zurich. Managing these rather large groups was enabled by supporting discussions with an electronic meeting system12. The system was used to conduct electronic brainstorming episodes, quantitative questionnaires as well as written discussions and supported moderation as well as documentation of participant contributions. The focus groups lasted 150 minutes each. The majority of participants (22 of 28) categorized themselves as at least “affluent”, and only 3 clients indicated their wealth being below 50’000 CHF; details on the demographics of the participants can be found in Table 6-10 in Appendix A1.
12 Group Systems: http://www.groupsystems.com
6.3.3 Phase 3: Validate Understanding through Investigations on a Larger