Synchronous Technology-Mediated Service Experience Scale (STMSE)

1. Abstract

The Synchronous Technology-Mediated Service Experience Scale (STMSE) is a psychometric instrument developed to evaluate consumer experiences during live, real-time, interactive virtual services facilitated by human service providers (such as Airbnb Online Experiences and Amazon Explore). Unlike asynchronous online services, pre-recorded virtual reality (VR) environments, or conventional e-commerce interfaces, synchronous technology-mediated services blend real-time human interaction, dynamic interpersonal responsiveness, remote environmental immersion, and peer co-presence. The STMSE operationalizes customer experience as a higher-order reflective construct comprising four distinct first-order dimensions: Immersive Spatial Telepresence, Responsive Provider Engagement, Experiential Learning Enhancement, and Virtual Co-experience.

Validated across three rigorous empirical studies using multi-wave sampling procedures, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the STMSE demonstrates exemplary psychometric properties. Internal consistency reliability coefficients across its subscales consistently exceed standard academic benchmarks (Cronbach’s alpha α ≥ .85; Composite Reliability CR ≥ .86). Construct validity is established via robust convergent and discriminant validity metrics, including Average Variance Extracted (AVE > .55) and the Heterotrait-Monotrait ratio of correlations (HTMT < .85). Predictive and nomological validity assessments verify that the scale explains significant variance in consumer downstream outcomes, including psychological ownership of the service experience, repurchase intention, and customer recommendation intentions. The instrument provides researchers, service designers, and experience economy practitioners with a standardized, empirically validated tool to diagnose, benchmark, and optimize live digital service delivery.

2. Keywords

Synchronous technology-mediated services, STMSE, virtual tourism, telepresence, provider responsiveness, experiential learning, virtual co-presence, customer experience scale, psychometrics, psychological ownership.

3. Authors

The Synchronous Technology-Mediated Service Experience Scale was developed and validated by a collaborative team of international researchers in service marketing, consumer behavior, and information systems:

• Cheng Lyu: School of Management / Business, specializing in interactive service marketing, virtual consumer environments, and digital experience design.
• Yang Jiang: Department of Marketing, focusing on digital consumer interactions, live-streaming services, and interactive technology adoption.
• M. S. Balaji: Associate Professor / Senior Lecturer of Marketing, an expert in service marketing, customer-technology interfaces, and relationship marketing.
• Ying Wang: Department of Tourism, Hospitality and Event Management, investigating virtual tourism, destination engagement, and tourist psychological states.

Correspondence regarding the original psychometric validation study can be directed through institutional channels cited in the publication: Journal of Business Research (Lyu et al., 2026).

4. Purpose

The rapid digital transformation of the service economy has birthed innovative service models that transcend conventional operational categorizations. Historically, service environments were partitioned into either physical encounters (involving human face-to-face contact within physical servicescapes) or automated digital self-service technologies (such as e-commerce platforms, websites, and conversational artificial intelligence). However, advancements in high-bandwidth telecommunications, interactive video broadcasting, and ubiquitous mobile computing have fostered an emergent service paradigm: synchronous technology-mediated services. Exemplified by platforms like Airbnb Online Experiences, Amazon Explore, live virtual museum tours, and personalized live remote masterclasses, this delivery format pairs geographically dispersed consumers with a live local service provider who streams real-time physical environments while engaging in spontaneous interpersonal dialogue.

Existing psychometric instruments fail to adequately measure the idiosyncratic nuances of this medium. Traditional service quality models, such as SERVQUAL (Parasuraman et al., 1988), were constructed for brick-and-mortar operations, assuming that consumers and providers share the same physical coordinates. Conversely, e-service quality scales (e.g., E-S-QUAL; Parasuraman et al., 2005) focus primarily on technological interface attributes, such as website navigation, privacy, system availability, and transaction fulfillment, overlooking the intense interpersonal dynamic and live emotional resonance created by a human host. Furthermore, generic customer experience scales (e.g., Brakus et al., 2009) do not address the complex interplay between physical spatial distance, live video mediation, and simultaneous social interaction.

The primary purpose of the STMSE is to fill this conceptual and measurement gap by operationalizing a robust, psychometrically sound measurement model tailored explicitly to real-time, remote, human-led digital services. The scale addresses critical research and clinical/managerial imperatives:

• Theoretical Diagnostics: It untangles how consumers process the illusion of physical transportation alongside interpersonal social cues, clarifying the cognitive, emotional, and social mechanisms that govern remote service consumption.
• Cross-Platform Benchmarking: It furnishes academic researchers with a standardized index to contrast consumer appraisals across distinct live platforms, varying bandwidth environments, and diverse cultural destination offerings.
• Managerial Quality Control: For organizations operating live remote experiences, the STMSE isolates operational shortcomings, allowing managers to discern whether customer dissatisfaction stems from poor technological telepresence, sluggish host responsiveness, superficial informational content, or inadequate peer integration.
• Predictive Analytics in Service Science: The instrument facilitates empirical modeling of key relational outcomes, notably customer loyalty, willing price premiums, word-of-mouth advocacy, and psychological ownership of remote assets.

5. Psychological Construct

The STMSE conceptualizes the synchronous technology-mediated service experience as a multidimensional, higher-order reflective construct. In a reflective-reflective structural configuration, the underlying latent experience manifests across four core first-order dimensions, each capturing a distinct facet of the consumer’s perceptual, emotional, and cognitive involvement during a live session.

1. Immersive Spatial Telepresence

Spatial telepresence is defined as the psychological state in which a person experiences the vivid sensation of “being there” in a remote environment mediated by technology, temporarily losing perceptual awareness of their physical surroundings (Steuer, 1992; Lombard & Ditton, 1997). In synchronous technology-mediated services, spatial telepresence involves the user feeling sensorially and mentally transported into the host’s physical environment (e.g., walking through a Kyoto market or navigating a Tuscan vineyard). This dimension captures the vividness of the audio-visual feed, the dynamic camera movements that mirror natural human vision, and the cognitive allocation of attentional resources away from the immediate domestic room toward the remote destination.

2. Responsive Provider Engagement

This dimension reflects the degree to which the remote service provider actively, promptly, and empathetically attends to consumer cues, inquiries, and affective states in real time. Unlike static video tours, synchronous services rely heavily on the human provider acting as an interactive surrogate. Responsive provider engagement encompasses conversational spontaneity, personalized feedback, attentiveness to audience requests (e.g., “Can you turn the camera left and show that street food vendor?”), and the host’s capacity to demonstrate genuine warmth, humor, and cultural hospitality through the digital interface. It taps into interpersonal immediacy and communicative adaptability.

3. Experiential Learning Enhancement

Drawing from Experiential Learning Theory, this dimension measures the cognitive acquisition of novel skills, insights, cultural knowledge, and contextual understandings gained through active participation in the live session. Synchronous services often serve educational, transformative, or hobbyist objectives (e.g., learning to roll pasta from an Italian chef, identifying architectural styles in Rome, or understanding indigenous artisan weaving). Experiential learning enhancement assesses whether consumers feel mentally enriched, intellectually stimulated, and capable of applying newly gained knowledge, shifting the experience from mere passive entertainment to meaningful personal growth.

4. Virtual Co-experience

Virtual co-experience addresses the social-affective dimension of sharing the synchronous session with other participants who are physically remote yet digitally co-present. Rooted in the psychological construct of social presence and shared reality, this dimension captures the perception of communal belonging, mutual awareness, shared laughter, and reciprocal commentary occurring among attendees via chat functions, live audio contributions, or visual reaction windows. It reflects the degree to which participants feel they are part of a cohesive social cohort engaging in a collective journey rather than isolated individuals consuming an isolated video feed.

6. Theoretical Framework

The architectural foundation of the STMSE integrates several complementary psychological and communication theories to explain how mediated interactions generate profound customer engagement.

Social Presence Theory and Telepresence Conceptualizations

The foundational premise of the scale originates from Social Presence Theory (Short, Williams, & Christie, 1976) and Telepresence Frameworks (Steuer, 1992; Biocca, 1997). Social presence posits that communication media differ in their capacity to transmit the physical, nonverbal, and psychological presence of interacting actors. In synchronous platforms, high bandwidth and bidirectional audio-video facilitate high social presence, allowing users to project their consciousness across geographical divides. Simultaneously, telepresence posits that immersion is attained when sensory data delivered through technology dominates environmental sensory inputs. The STMSE posits that when high spatial telepresence intersects with responsive human communication, the technological interface becomes psychologically “transparent,” producing an authentic encounter.

Servicescape and E-Servicescape Theory

Bitner’s (1992) Servicescape model asserts that environmental stimuli (ambient conditions, spatial layout, signs, and symbols) influence customer internal cognitive, emotional, and physiological states, which in turn drive approach or avoidance behaviors. While traditional e-servicescape models (Hopkins et al., 2009) focus exclusively on static website design, layout, and transactional security, synchronous technology introduces a hybrid interactive live servicescape. The STMSE operationalizes this expanded framework by capturing both the remote physical background captured by the camera and the real-time social dynamics mediated by the digital channel.

Cognitive Load and Experiential Learning Paradigms

Grounded in Kolb’s (1984) Experiential Learning Theory and Sweller’s (1988) Cognitive Load Theory, learning through digital platforms requires a delicate balance between sensory stimulation and cognitive processing. When a synchronous host effectively structures the real-time demonstration, engages in scaffolding, and invites immediate participant action, cognitive load is optimized. The customer is not just receiving abstract data; they are actively encoding sensory and episodic memories through experiential immersion.

Psychological Ownership Theory

Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks (2001, 2003) developed Psychological Ownership Theory, positing that individuals can experience a state in which an object, concept, or experience feels “theirs” even in the absence of legal or physical possession. Psychological ownership arises through three primary “routes”: control over the target, intimate knowledge of the target, and investment of the self into the target. In the nomological network of the STMSE, synchronous technology-mediated experiences supply all three routes: participants control the host’s actions via interactive requests, gain intimate insider knowledge from a local expert, and invest their emotional and cognitive energy into live co-creation. Thus, the STMSE directly fuels feelings of psychological ownership, leading to strong emotional attachment and sustained brand advocacy.

7. Validity

The development of the STMSE followed classical psychometric test development guidelines (Churchill, 1979; Gerbing & Anderson, 1988) across three interconnected empirical studies designed to establish content, construct, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity.

Content and Face Validity

Initial item generation utilized a deductive approach based on extensive literature review, supplemented by an inductive approach comprising in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 24 experienced consumers of synchronous virtual experiences. A panel of five academic experts in service management, consumer psychology, and measurement design assessed the initial item pool. Items exhibiting ambiguity, conceptual overlap, or low relevance were eliminated or rephrased, ensuring rigorous content and face validity before pilot testing.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity evaluates whether the operational indicators of a construct correlate strongly with one another. Across confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) runs conducted in Study 2 (calibration sample, N = 312) and Study 3 (validation sample, N = 428), all standardized factor loadings (λ) for the first-order dimensions exceeded the recommended .70 threshold (ranging between .74 and .89), with all loadings statistically significant at p < .001. The Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values for each latent dimension exceeded the conventional .50 benchmark:

• Immersive Spatial Telepresence: AVE = .64 to .68
• Responsive Provider Engagement: AVE = .69 to .73
• Experiential Learning Enhancement: AVE = .61 to .66
• Virtual Co-experience: AVE = .58 to .63

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established via two distinct methodological techniques:

1. Fornell-Larcker Criterion: The square root of the AVE for each construct exceeded the inter-construct correlation coefficients between that construct and all other latent variables in the model, demonstrating that each subscale shares more variance with its own indicators than with other dimensions.
2. Heterotrait-Monotrait Ratio of Correlations (HTMT): All calculated HTMT values between dimension pairs ranged from .52 to .78, comfortably below the conservative .85 threshold, ruling out multi-collinearity and confirming empirical distinctiveness.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity was substantiated by examining the relationship between the STMSE and theoretically anchored downstream consequences using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM). The global STMSE higher-order construct demonstrated strong, positive, and statistically significant predictive relationships with:

• Psychological Ownership (β = .54, p < .001)
• Repurchase / Re-booking Intention (β = .48, p < .001)
• Word-of-Mouth Recommendation Intention (β = .61, p < .001)

Furthermore, mediation analysis confirmed that psychological ownership acts as a significant mediator through which the STMSE dimensions indirectly influence long-term customer behavioral loyalty.

8. Reliability

Psychometric reliability was thoroughly evaluated using multiple internal consistency indices across independent samples. The results confirm that the STMSE possesses exceptional measurement precision without redundancy.

Internal Consistency Reliability

Both Cronbach’s alpha (α) and Composite Reliability (CR) were computed across exploratory and confirmatory stages. In both calibration and cross-validation datasets, the indices comfortably exceeded the rigorous academic criterion of .80:

• Immersive Spatial Telepresence: α = .88 (CR = .89)
• Responsive Provider Engagement: α = .91 (CR = .92)
• Experiential Learning Enhancement: α = .86 (CR = .87)
• Virtual Co-experience: α = .85 (CR = .86)
• Overall Higher-Order STMSE Construct: α = .93 (CR = .94)

Measurement Stability

A subset of participants (N = 85) who engaged in repeated live synchronous sessions over a four-week span completed test-retest assessments. The test-retest intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) exceeded .82 across all subscales, demonstrating temporal stability while preserving sensitivity to genuine variations in live host delivery quality.

9. Factor Analysis

The factor structure of the STMSE was scrutinized through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA), utilizing maximum likelihood estimation with robust standard errors (MLR).

Exploratory Factor Analysis (Study 1)

During the scale development phase, an initial pool of candidate items was administered to an exploratory cohort (N = 240). Principal Axis Factoring with Promax (oblique) rotation was executed. The Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measure of sampling adequacy was .92, and Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity was highly significant (χ²(190) = 2841.52, p < .001), indicating strong factorability. Parallel analysis and scree plot inspection confirmed a clear four-factor solution, accounting for 68.4% of the total cumulative variance. All retained items exhibited strong factor loadings on their primary dimension (> .70) with negligible cross-loadings (< .25).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit (Studies 2 & 3)

To confirm the structural integrity of the construct, competing structural models were tested against the empirical data:

• Model 1: One-factor global model (all items loading on a single latent factor).
• Model 2: Four-factor first-order uncorrelated model.
• Model 3: Four-factor first-order correlated model.
• Model 4: Higher-order reflective model (four first-order factors loading on a single second-order STMSE construct).

The comparative model fit indices revealed that the higher-order reflective model (Model 4) and the correlated first-order model (Model 3) achieved superior fit over alternative configurations. Model 4, supporting the theoretical proposition of STMSE as a multifaceted umbrella construct, produced excellent goodness-of-fit indices:

• Chi-square / Degrees of Freedom (χ²/df): 1.84 (values below 3.0 denote excellent fit)
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .968 (criterion ≥ .95)
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .961 (criterion ≥ .95)
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .044 (90% Confidence Interval: [.036, .052]; criterion ≤ .06)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .038 (criterion ≤ .08)

Second-order factor loadings of the four sub-dimensions onto the general STMSE factor were all substantial and statistically significant (γ ranging from .76 to .88, p < .001), corroborating the theoretical hierarchical structure.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The STMSE is operationalized as a standardized self-report survey. The following specifications detail its structural composition and administrative procedures:

• Test Type: Psychometric rating scale (self-administered survey).
• Construct Level: Second-order reflective multidimensional construct.
• Dimensional Structure: Four first-order subscales:
  • Immersive Spatial Telepresence (assessing physical/spatial transport into the live remote destination).
  • Responsive Provider Engagement (assessing real-time attentiveness, conversational agility, and personalization by the host).
  • Experiential Learning Enhancement (assessing cognitive enrichment, cultural insights, and skill acquisition).
  • Virtual Co-experience (assessing social co-presence and mutual engagement with fellow attendees).
• Response Format: Standard 7-point Likert scale (1 = “Strongly Disagree”, 2 = “Disagree”, 3 = “Somewhat Disagree”, 4 = “Neutral / Neither Agree nor Disagree”, 5 = “Somewhat Agree”, 6 = “Agree”, 7 = “Strongly Agree”).
• Target Population: Adult consumers (ages 18+) who have participated in a real-time, live video-mediated service or virtual tour hosted by a human provider.
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 7 minutes.
• Scoring Procedures:
  • Subscale Scores: Computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of all items belonging to the respective subscale.
  • Global STMSE Score: Computed either by averaging the four subscale mean scores or by summing the total items. Higher scores denote a more immersive, engaging, informative, and socially cohesive service encounter.
  • Reverse Scoring: All items are positively valenced; no reverse scoring is required.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Synchronous Technology-Mediated Service Experience Scale was formally published in 2026. The copyright for the peer-reviewed article and its proprietary formulations is held by the authors and the publisher, Elsevier Inc. (under the Journal of Business Research imprint).

For non-commercial academic research, empirical research studies, and scholarly dissertations, the construct framework, conceptual definitions, and operational scale criteria may be referenced and utilized subject to fair use academic conventions, provided that proper formal bibliographic citation is given to Lyu et al. (2026). Commercial entities, market research corporations, platform developers, and organizations intending to integrate the instrument into fee-charging software, diagnostic toolkits, or commercial customer feedback systems should secure written permission and licensing clearance from the copyright holder or lead authors.

12. References

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• Brakus, J. J., Schmitt, B. H., & Zarantonello, L. (2009). Brand experience: What is it? How is it measured? Does it affect loyalty? Journal of Marketing, 73(3), 52–68. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.73.3.052
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• Kolb, D. A. (1984). Experiential learning: Experience as the source of learning and development. Prentice-Hall.
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• Pierce, J. L., Kostova, T., & Dirks, K. T. (2003). The state of psychological ownership: Integrating and extending a century of research. Review of General Psychology, 7(1), 84–107. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.7.1.84
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• Sweller, J. (1988). Cognitive load during problem solving: Effects on learning. Cognitive Science, 12(2), 257–285. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog1202_4

13. Items of the Scale