Customer Satisfaction In Retail Industry

The way to a retail customer’s heart is through the retail store. It is therefore crucial for retailers to efficiently manage their in-store customer experience to ensure that their customers have a good reason to return to their stores (Kumar et al 2014). In the best of economic times, the retail industry is a battleground of company’s fight to obtain the most sales, profits and loyal consumers. In difficult economic times marked by high unemployment and rising food and gas prices, the retail landscape is comparable to the gladiator days of the Roman Empire. The topmost priority of every company is to maintain its customer satisfaction in this dynamic competitive environment because customer satisfaction will ultimately leads towards the customer

Literature Review

Store attributes play a key role in improving the customer satisfaction ultimately the customer loyalty. Store personality is characterized by the several functional and psychological attributes (Martineau, 1958). Several sets of store attributes lead towards forming a construct of store (Doyle and Fenwick, 1974; Kim and Jin, 2001; Dong-Mo, 2003).

Finn (2004) has proposed certain store attributes including store atmosphere, store image, facility of parking, location, merchandise convenience etc. Retail marketing mix has an effect on store attributes (Chen & Hu, 2010;Jinfeng&Zhilong, 2009), like location, display feature, parking facility, clean and spacious environmental atmosphere, etc. Hedrick et al (2005) proposed that store environment and store atmospheric also influence the customer’s expectations on the retail salesperson. The researchers conducted a study on sales people and store atmosphere, and identified that customer’s perceptions of a salesperson’s attributes and relationship building behaviors were important drivers of customer

People during their shopping trip formulate their experiences in terms of satisfaction. In other words, the customer’s satisfaction is affected by the psychical environment of the store, the various procedures they have to follow (cashiers, queues, traffic, trolleys, etc), the moments of contact with salespeople and the entire offer of the retailer i.e. product variety, assortment, quality and pricing policy (Morschett et al., 2005). Martineau (1958) has defined this overall evaluation of the total retailer’s offer in the customers mind as “store image”. Customers evaluate the retail store by combining all the attributes described above in order to decide their degree for satisfaction (Pan and Zinkhan, 2006; Finn and Louviere, 1996; Kasulis and Lusch, 1981).The authors concluded that customer loyalty is directly related to satisfaction, and that satisfaction comes from the various attributes of the store’s