Service with an E-Smile: Employee Authenticity and Customer Usage of Web-Based Services

Companies often go to great lengths to ensure that service representatives are friendly during their interactions with customers. Friendliness, however, is not always enough - customers must believe that employees are being authentic in their exchanges. Unfortunately, providing an authentic customer service experience becomes complicated when companies use web-based support services as a way to assist their customers. In this study, we seek to explain the effect customer judgments of service provider authenticity have on evaluations of web-based customer support services. Data collected from real users of a library e-reference (live-chat) service suggest that the perceived authenticity of online service representatives´ communications predicted patrons´ intentions to use the system again in the future. This main effect was mediated by patrons´ perceptions of the service encounter as well as of the web-based support system itself.