According
to Abubakar et al. (2001), satisfaction is basically
a post-purchase evaluation by the consumers of their overall
experience of the service. It is an affective reaction of
the consumers when their desires and expectations have been
either met or exceeded in the course of experiencing the service.
In the context of a retail supermarket, satisfaction could
be interpreted as just meeting the expectations of the customers,
not any sort of exceeding or falling short of the expectations.
Most of the retailers try to achieve competitive advantage
by taking the responses of the customers beyond the level
of `just satisfied' towards `exceeding their expectations'.
Service
quality has been measured in previous researches (Parasuraman
et al., 1988) by the gap between the consumer expectations
of a service and their perceptions after they have used the
service. Customer satisfaction is expected to be achieved
when the value of customer service provided through a service
experience is either meeting or exceeding consumer expectations.
If the expectations are not met, the consumer will be dissatisfied.
Another consequence can be that if the satisfaction scores
are very low, the service provider might be susceptible to
attacks by the competitors who are prepared to deliver superior
value to the customers.
Customer
satisfaction has become a crucial point of differentiation
in a retail store, where consumers make weekly, fortnightly
or monthly trips (to preferred supermarket) and then spend
more on these trips than other times, especially in countries
like India when competition in retailing is very fierce. Unfortunately
in retail industry, most of the unsatisfied consumers do not
complain, they just go shopping somewhere else. So the lesson
for the retailers is that customer expectations always move
upward and it is only the satisfied customers that are more
likely to remain loyal in the long run. |
