A Study of Interaction between Product and Service Qualities and Satisfaction

Information system organizations frequently offer complex IT applications and services to its users. These organizations would want the users of these systems to imbue positive “intentions to use” toward the systems. According to the literature, the construct “intention to use” is influenced by the “perceived satisfaction” derived by the particular user when using or consuming a particular product. For complex systems such as non-trivial IT products, user satisfaction is extremely important in terms of use of that particular system. In this paper, we posit that there are two components of “perceived satisfaction”, namely “product subsystem satisfaction” and “service subsystem satisfaction” and that these two components jointly influence the users’ “intention to use”. When users encounter both a product and its service, they are likely to form separate perceptions about product quality and service quality. Product and service qualities would in-turn cause product subsystem satisfaction and service subsystem satisfaction. The satisfaction subsystems independently influence the “intention to use”. We are conducting a field study to confirm the relationships between the quality subsystem, the service subsystem, the intention to use, and the interaction between service and product quality subsystems. The field study is being conducted in a firm which has implemented a company wide ERP system. In this paper, we expect to reveal relationships between the constructs of perceived quality, satisfaction and behavioral intentions in the “service subsystem” and the “product subsystem”. Moreover, the study will also provide evidence to the extent of interaction between the two subsystems.