Retailing: A Service Experience for Customers
Retailing is under the service domain. It is a service rendering activity. Sivakumar (2007) stated that the retailing situation had begun to change after the 1980s. After globalization, multi-brand retailers started their business in the Indian market, creating neck-to-neck competition among them. Cameran, Moizer, and Pettinicchio (2010) opined that retailers could not win competitive advantages by using only traditional competitive strategies, i.e., product quality, pricing, place, and promotion. Retailers were trying to find out some alternative strategies to overcome this problem. Yan and Pei (2009) discovered that retail services could be used as an alternative strategy to differentiate themselves from others and can effectively safeguard them from the increasing threats of direct marketers and e-retailers. MacKenzie, Meyer, and Noble (2013) observed that demographic changes, multichannel communication processes, the rapid growth of e-commerce, changes in the distribution channel, and personalized marketing are the five main factors that increase the importance of Services in retailing. Berry (1995) opined that long term relationships with customers are a crucial factor for increasing customer loyalty and, as a result, retailers get additional competitive advantage from their competitors. Gagliano and Hathcote (1994) viewed that service quality in retail is growing continuously to provide more and more customer satisfaction.
At the same time, competition in retail services is escalating vigorously. Retailing is going through radical change due to technological up-gradation, digitalization, plastic money, customer knowledge, and the internet. Therefore, customers are more informative and knowledgeable. Their desire to get more quality and quantity is a big challenge to the retail service providers. Furthermore, many companies opt for business restructuring like franchising, expansion of businesses in hinterlands, technological development like automatic vending, easing payment procedures by accepting plastic money, delivering goods through an online transaction, etc. that evolves a new set of customers whose satisfaction is a point of concern for business success.