Retail Store and Service Quality: A Study On Hypermarkets In Ahmedabad City.

Abstract

Each organized retail outlet in India handles a lot of transactions every day and each of these transactions is a potential source of inefficiency and incompetence-related defect. Efforts are essential to reduce such occurrences and to continually improve the organizational Performance by management of retail service quality. On the other side Indian consumers are becoming more careful for their shopping experience and demanding as far as lifestyle is concerned. An increased and increasing purchasing power would lead to higher demand for better shopping ambience, superior quality, products, and improved store service. Researchers in the area of service quality suggested that an organization belonging to either manufacturing or service sector need to focus on "service quality" as it delivers multiple benefits, such as it is a critical determinant of competitiveness, long-term profitability, repurchases intentions, consumer satisfaction, helps positioning in a competitive environment. As per the Technopak customer data analysis for the year 2011-2012 the success of many retailers across the world and the failure of others can be attributed to one of the major areas where Indian organized retail stores need to focus is customer centric retail store services. In service organizations, customer-perceived service quality is considered as one of the key determinants of business performance and retail businesses are considered to be service business. This study of retail service quality is performed with consumers shopping at hypermarkets in Ahmedabad city in the state of Gujarat. The main purpose of the study is to explore various factors that influence customer perception of hypermarkets service quality. Retail service quality scale (RSQS) developed by Dabholkar inl996 employed in this study as it was specially designed to measure retail store service quality in the key areas like Physical aspect, Reliability, Personal Interaction, Problem Solving and Policy aspects.