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This paper aims to reveal the factors patients consider when choosing a doctor for consultation on an online medical consultation (OMC) platform and how these factors influence doctors' consultation volumes.

In Study 1, influencing factors reflected as service features were identified by applying a feature extraction method to physician reviews, and the importance of each feature was determined based on word frequencies and the PageRank algorithm. Sentiment analysis was used to analyze patient satisfaction with each service feature. In Study 2, regression models were used to analyze the relationships between the service features obtained from Study 1 and the doctor's consultation volume.

The study identified 14 service features of patients' concerns and found that patients mostly care about features such as trust, phraseology, overall service experience, word of mouth and personality traits, all of which describe a doctor's soft skills. These service features affect patients' trust in doctors, which, in turn, affects doctors' consultation volumes.

This research is important as it informs doctors about the features they should improve, to increase their consultation volume on OMC platforms. Furthermore, it not only enriches current trust-related research in the field of OMC, which has a certain reference significance for subsequent research on establishing trust in online doctor–patient relationships, but it also provides a reference for research concerning the antecedents of trust in general.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the mediation impacts of core, relational and tangible service-quality features on the relationship between customer–frontline employee rapport and customer dependency in an emerging market context. The study examines the moderating effects of relationship age and frequency of customers’ physical visits.

Partial least squares-based structural equation modelling was used to analyse data from a survey of 290 financial services customers in Dhaka, Bangladesh using the convenience sampling technique.

Results show that relational service-quality features had the largest mediation impact on the rapport–dependency relationship, followed by core and tangible service-quality features. Relationship age was not found to be a significant moderator for any relationship. However, the moderation effect of the frequency of customers’ physical visits to the service premises was significant, but only for the link between relational service-quality features and customer dependency and not for the other two types of service-quality features.

Data collected from several other emerging markets would provide more rigorous findings: this is recommended as an avenue for further research.

Practitioners can manipulate specific relational or tangible service-quality features to increase customer dependency on their firms, thus ensuring longer-term customer retention.

This study is the first one to examine the relative significance of the impacts of relational features vs tangible features of services on customer dependency in the emerging market context, with rapport serving as an antecedent.

This paper aims to identify the reasons for the lower ranking of the Online Service Index of Sri Lanka under the United Nations E-Government Readiness Index. The study is conducted as a comparative study on selected Asian countries and suggests remedial measures for the improvement of the status of e-government of Sri Lanka.

In this regard, as the sample of websites ranked according to the Online Service Index of the United Nations, five government websites of Sri Lanka, India, Bangladesh and Singapore were selected. They are the national portal and the websites of the five Ministries: The Ministry of Education, Finance, Health, Labor and of Social Services. Asian countries selected are India, Bangladesh and Singapore including Sri Lanka. Observation method was the mainly used method for data collection. The websites were evaluated in contrast with the help of the “Main features reviewed by the United Nations E-government Survey” as the checklist. Substantial description and scoring methods were used for the analysis of the data and the presentation of the findings of the study.

Thus, several weaknesses of the online services of the government websites of Sri Lanka were identified. Among them, the major reasons identified for the lower rank of the Sri Lankan Online Service Index were, for example, the inability to identify the exact website of national portal, the lack of accessibility or usability features, the weaknesses in the active maintenance of the “Contact us” feature, service-delivery capability features, citizen participation and also interconnectedness features. The above weaknesses have been the key/root causes for the decline of the rank of the Online Service Index of Sri Lanka.

From five government websites, selected three foreign Asian countries were in focus because of practical limitations. Another difficulty faced in the analysis and comparison of the websites was that the information with regard to the United Nations evaluation methodology/criteria has not been adequately provided.

The findings of this study provide information for the policy makers, web standards, evaluation criteria developers and almost all the government organizations to address key issues related to this field for the maximization of citizen participation, the enhancement of the service-delivery capabilities and accessibility features of websites to improve the online services of the government. This study unfolded several areas for the future researchers. Those researches can also be conducted based on sub indexes of the United Nations E-Government Readiness Index. The same method could be used to examine Human Capital Index, Telecommunication and Infrastructure Index and Citizen Participation Index. This research could also be expanded through observations of foreign countries.

This paper provides an overview of the quality of government websites of Sri Lanka compared to the selected Asian countries. Through the utilization of this scoring method, four major weaknesses that contribute to the lower ranking of the online service of Sri Lanka were identified with suggestions indented for the improvement of the government websites.

The aim of this paper is to present a conceptual framework which explores the links between the two service features (physical and interactive), job satisfaction and their impact on customer satisfaction.

A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample of 168 first line employees of a major European port. Structural equation modelling and regression analysis were used to examine and test the relationships.

The empirical data verifies structural relationships between service quality, customer satisfaction and job satisfaction, treating job satisfaction as a consequence of physical features and as an antecedent of interactive features. The direct impact of employee job satisfaction on customer satisfaction, together with its indirect influence via service features, were tested and supported by the empirical data.

This study extends the literature by examining the distinct role that the interactive and physical features of services play in the formation of job satisfaction, which in turn influences customer satisfaction. This perspective could improve managerial understanding of the service quality‐job satisfaction relationship and lead to more focused decisions.

The paper aims to find out what users expect from a news aggregator service, and how the current and available news aggregator services compare to each other in terms of their features and usability from users' perspectives.

Five news aggregator services were chosen randomly, and a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods were used for data collection involving users from the academic and research community. A total of 45 users participated in the questionnaire survey, and ten users participated in the interview. The researchers created the factors used for comparison of the features and usability of the chosen services based on the review of appropriate literature and a study of the chosen news aggregator services. Users were asked to comment on every feature of a chosen service using a ten‐point scale.

Users identified a number of expected features of news aggregators. Survey results show that an ideal news aggregator service may be created by combining the usability features of TVEyes and the retrieval performance of GoogleNews.

This research is based on a small set of users and a small number of news aggregator services. A larger sample set may produce more conclusive results.

Studies reporting on the features and usability of news aggregator services is not common in the literature. In that respect, this is an important and new piece of research. The findings of this research may be used by researchers or service providers to produce a new aggregator service, or improve an existing news aggregator service.

This paper aims to help higher education institutions (HEIs) develop a better understanding of student support and services needs, thereby enabling them to allocate limited resources for initiatives that effectively improve student experience.

An assessment framework following the Kano analysis is developed to categorize student service features based on customer satisfaction and need fulfillment. The framework is used at a local university, using 23 service features listed as minimum requirements by the national regulatory body for education. Analysis of the satisfaction survey results and prioritization are based on quality indices derived from a factor of importance and the satisfaction gap. A survey was conducted for two academic years to generate a comparison of results.

Of the list mandated as minimum requirements for HEIs, the study revealed that no features were regarded as “must-be,” eight as performing, 14 as attractive and one as indifferent by the students. As these results were disaggregated per year level, the natural decay of delight as in the Kano theory was exhibited as there were less attractive features for students who have been in the university longest. After a full-year academic cycle, results compared to the baseline figures seemed to reveal of impact of the achievement of performance targets by the units rendering specific activities on client satisfaction.

Further rounds of the study are needed to build up more data sets on the relationship between objective performance and satisfaction level for performing features, mindful that this categorization is also bound to change along the way.

As HEIs in the Philippines journey towards the establishment of their own respective internal quality assurance systems, this study provides a practical approach for institutions to transform a mere list of student services for compliance into a strategic tool to enhance the student experience.

In the context of continuous quality improvement, the study presents how the qualitative Kano model, along with simple quantitative tools in the methodology, can be utilized not only in the planning stage of service design but also in closing the planning, doing, checking and acting (PDCA) cycle and opening the quality improvement spiral.

With the increasing dependence on market-based distribution of health-care resources in the USA, spending on health-care service advertisements directly targeting consumers has also increased. Previous research has shown that the ads fail to deliver information deemed essential by regulators. Nevertheless, the attitude of consumers toward health-care service advertising has been more positive than negative. The purpose of this study is to create a taxonomy of advertising information features to better describe the relationships between information features in the advertisements and consumer attitudes toward them.

A cross-sectional survey was conducted with 128 health-care consumers in a western state in the USA.

Factor analysis generated seven groups of information features. Among them, information features about access, cost and quality of care were rated as most helpful, whereas providers’ clinical qualifications and communication were rated least helpful. The advertising attitude measure was validated to contain two subscales, one regarding health-care service advertising and the other regarding physicians who advertise. People who highly rated the consumerism features had more positive attitudes toward health-care service advertising and people who highly rated provider clinical qualification features had more negative attitudes toward advertising physicians.

This study made methodological improvements in health-care service advertising research that would be crucial for its theoretical development. It also shed light on consumer characteristics and perceptions about information features that could influence their attitudes toward health-care service advertising.

Investigates time as a factor that influences consumer preferences for innovative technological services such as the Internet. Specifically, the case of consumer adoption of the Internet for home use is explored. Examines the effect of time of adoption of Internet based services on preferences at the individual consumer level. The key research question is “What is the effect of time of adoption on consumer preferences for a technological service such as the Internet?” The primary contribution of this research is to demonstrate that existing time preference frameworks, previously applied to consumer durable products, can also be applied to technological service innovations, such as the Internet. An empirical examination is conducted using data from a survey of consumers in the initial stages of Internet adoption.

The aim of this paper is to present and empirically validate a conceptual framework that explores the links between the two service features (physical and interactive) and their impact on customer loyalty. It also introduces and investigates the potential intervening role of a single personality dimension (neuroticism) in the relationship between service features and customer loyalty. In addition, examining whether the customer’s switching barriers affect customer loyalty is also an aim of the present study.

A structured questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample of 224 customers in the banking industry in Greece. The respondents were picked using simple random sampling. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to validate the latent factors of the proposed conceptual framework, whereas their relationships were examined through linear regression analyses.

The empirical data verify that physical and interactive features of service quality have a significant impact on customer loyalty. The study also concludes that customer neuroticism has an intervening effect on the relationship between service features and customer loyalty. In addition, switching barriers such as confidence benefits, special treatment benefits, switching costs and availability and attentiveness of alternatives affect a bank’s customer loyalty.

This perspective could improve managerial understanding of the service-quality/customer-loyalty relationship and lead to more focused decisions. During the period of economic Greek crisis, the customers’ learning and understanding, the immediate response to their needs and expectations, the provision of customer services in accordance with their personality type and the establishment a long and effective relationship with them may have an important impact not only on success but also mainly on bank survival.

Previous studies have shown the positive and significant relationship between customer satisfaction and loyalty in the banking industry, but this study extends the literature of consumer behavior theory by examining the distinct role that the physical and interactive service features play in the formation of customer loyalty. While it is known the role of personality in customer satisfaction has not been analyzed sufficiently the effect of neuroticism in the evolution of the above relationship. The present study tries to fill the bibliographic gap focusing on the Greek banking sector in the period of economic crisis.