Critical Factors Of Apparel Retail Service Quality-A Case Study Of Select State In India

The Indian Retail Industry is transforming and is the fastest growing sector contributing around 10 percent of the country’s GDP. Indian retail market is estimated to grow from $427 billion in 2010 to $637 billion by 2015. India became the prime destination for the global retailers because of its favorable demographics, high disposable income levels, changing life styles and increased customer awareness. The fast pace of the Indian retail industry presents many companies with a host of daily challenges. In today’s competitive environment and with the growing importance of services, delivering high quality services has become the basic retailing strategy. Deficiencies in service delivery certainly cause customer dissatisfaction and also affect profitability in the long run. In order to deliver high quality of services and to outperform the competition it becomes essential to all service managers to measure and manage their service quality. It is evident from the earlier studies that littler research has been done in Indian retail service quality and very litter research was evident in apparel retail service quality. So the present study was focused to identify the critical factors of apparel service quality in Indian context. The sample consists of 1012 respondents from four major cities having high potential for Retail Growth in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. A structured questionnaire was administered for data collection. Secondary data was collected from research databases, reports, journal articles etc. SPSS 17.0 was used for statistical analysis. Factor Analysis was applied to know the critical factors of service quality, the study helps the retailers to focus on critical areas of service - where to improve, where to modify and where to cut down and enables them to take effective service strategies. The study helps to understand which Service dimensions are very important at what places, so that the marketer can develop service strategies accordingly.