AN EVALUATION MODEL OF E-SERVICE QUALITY BY APPLYING HIERARCHICAL FUZZY TOPSIS METHOD

The evaluation of travel website service quality (TWSQ) is a multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) problem and has a strategic importance for those travel-related commercial companies. In practical environments, a decision-maker (DM) faces a variety of TWSQ that is often vague from human beings’ subjective judgments. The conventional methods for the evaluation of TWSQ are inadequate for dealing with the imprecision or uncertainty of linguistic assessment. In order to overcome this difficulty, the purpose of this study is to propose a hierarchical MCDM evaluation model based on the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (FAHP) and the fuzzy technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (FTOPSIS) methods. In this paper, the weights of criteria and ratings of alternatives are assessed by linguistic (natural language) variables expressed in triangular fuzzy numbers. Finally, four representative travel websites in Taiwan are provided to illustrate the practicability and usefulness of the proposed model. Moreover, the results of this study will help travel website managers understand their ranking positions relative to their competitors, thus can motivate travel website managers to provide appropriate levels of service quality in response to the e-customers’ needs.