Customer Service and Satisfaction

January 10th, 2021 by dayat Leave a reply »

In the contemporary era, competition has increased as customers persistently expect retail businesses to meet and exceed their expectations. Due to the fact of homogeneity among the products offered by retail businesses, they are increasingly focused towards delivering effective customer services in order to gain competitive advantage. For such businesses, maintaining customer satisfaction and trust is vital to ensure repeat purchases by customers. As these businesses operate in a highly competitive environment, customers have many choices to switch to other retailers, in such conditions retailers are engrossed towards the study of factors that lead to customer loyalty and retention.

Retail business is a sort of trading in which a firm of business entity sell goods directly to the end users. These businesses have direct relationships with customers, so they are directly involved in providing goods coupled with services to the customer. In retail business, customer satisfaction and trust primarily depend on the quality of services provided as they sell homogeneous products, on the basis of which one store cannot be differentiated from others. The examples of retail business include supermarkets, grocery stores, book stores, convenience stores and drug stores.

Books-A-Million

Books-A-Million is a bookstore company also famous as BAM! (Books, toys and more). It is the second largest bookstore chain in U.S as the company operates almost 200 stores across the country. Apart from the goods they offer i.e. books, toys, stationary, etc. they are unique in their services. The bookstore has developed an online help desk for customer support. Customers can check the status of their order or gift card balance by visiting customer support website of Books-A-Million. They are quick in responding to their customers’ complaint and requests.

With intent to provide unique and superior services entailed with the prime products of the store, Books-A-Million strive to gain competitive advantage over other bookstores. The major strategy adopted by the book store is to achieve supremacy in providing quality and timely services to customers in order to generate repurchase intentions among customers. The customers’ repurchase behavior depicts their level of satisfaction with the services of the company, satisfaction or trust ultimately leads to customer loyalty and customer satisfaction.

Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart is a multinational retail company, operating a chain of discount stores and warehouse stores. It is one of the largest retail store chain operating 4177 stores in United States. The CEO of Wal-Mart stated that loyal and repeat customers are the key to generating profits of Wal-Mart Company. Moreover, he stated that customers are more loyal to our store because our associates treat them proficiently as compared to other stores. Wal-Mart has always focused on training and developing friendly associates who understand the fact that customer is the king and act according to customers’ needs. Adopting customer-centered policies Wal-Mart has been more successful than rival companies who are just focused towards increasing profits.

The service strategy of Wal-Mart includes employee appreciation at its core which ultimately leads to customer satisfaction. It has been argued that Wal-Mart is in the business of providing services to its customers while its competitors are in the business of serving their CEO. The core principles of Wal-Mart include: customer is the boss, providing value to customer, delighting customer, providing recognition to employees and concern for communities in which it operates.

Barnes and Noble

Barnes & Noble is also a retail company. It is considered as the largest bookseller company in U.S. and is the leading seller of digital media and scholastic products across the country. It operates 658 independent retail stores and 714 college and university bookstores. Delivering satisfaction and service quality to customers is the prime policy of the company. It also provides online status information to customers regarding their orders and record online orders and customer complaints and tends to respond as quickly as possible. The major purpose of these entailed services is to get customers’ satisfaction leading to customer loyalty and commitment to the company.

Customer Retention

In this era of highly competitive world, it has been become difficult for businesses to retain their customers especially for retail businesses because they deal in homogeneous products. In such competition, superior service quality is only the key to get customers’ satisfaction and trust. If the customer is satisfied with the services of a company, he/she will intend to repurchase products from that company. The customer’s repeat purchase behavior is an indicator of customer’s loyalty and commitment with the company and he/she will not intend to switch to any other company. It is evident from the research studies that service quality is the key to retain customers.

Share of Wallet

It is a marketing term that refers to the level of customer’s expenditures on a particular product or service offered by a company. The share of wallet of each product offered by a retail business can be calculated by tracking the sale volume of each product. This is a process that is used by organizations or businesses to calculate revenue generated from a particular customer. The share of each customer to the total revenue of the company shows the purchase behavior of each customer and frequency of purchases of particular products. A satisfied customer will contribute more to the overall revenue of the company.

Referrals

Referral is also a marketing term, it is basically considered in context of word of mouth about a particular product, service or the company. A satisfied customer generates positive word of mouth about the company and refers his/her friends and siblings to buy products and services from a particular company. On the other hand, a dissatisfied customer generates negative word of mouth regarding the company which may results in losing existing and new potential customers.

Stock Market Performance

Stock market performance shows the individual and collective performance of the companies listed in stock exchange. The satisfied customers directly or indirectly increase the revenues and profits of the company which have a positive impact on the value of shares of the company and which ultimately lead to a superior performance of the company on stock exchange which is comprehended from the frequency of trading of shares of the company.

It is evident from the above explanation that in today’s competitive world, retail businesses strive to gain competitive advantage aiming to differentiate themselves from their competitors. This is only possible by providing superior services to the customers. It has been argued in the research studies that there is a significant and positive relation between service quality dimensions and customer satisfaction.

Moreover, it has been investigated that a satisfied custome

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