EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
India became the prime destination for the global retailers because of favorable demographics, high disposable income levels, changing life styles and increased customer awareness. Indian apparel retailing is the countrys largest opportunity for the organized retailers after food retailing. The fast pace of the Indian retail industry presents many companies with a host of daily challenges. The present study has been conducted on Customer Satisfaction on Apparel Retail Outlets in Hyderabad taking eight variables in to consideration. They are store, display, merchandise, sales personnel, sales promotion & ad campaigns, billing, alteration and exchange. This study has been conducted on behalf of shoppers stop from IMRB International. A structured questionnaire was designed and the responses were taken from people who had shopped from any apparel retail outlet in the past three months. The places visited for getting the responses were shopping malls like GVK one, central, life style, city center etc to ensure diversity of respondents. The data was collected from 181 respondents comprising of both the genders, young and middle aged people in different income groups with different marital status. This ensured that the responses are not biased towards any particular demographic segment. SPSS 17.0 was used for statistical analysis. The results will help the Retail Managers to plan and design their strategies towards these factors. They would also help 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 retail strategies.
INTRODUCTION
The Indian retail industry is divided in to unorganized and organized sectors. But in todays scenario unorganized sector is in to decline and organized sector is booming, because of Global market presence in India. The retail environment in India is highly competitive, being the second largest employment provider after agriculture. It is the second largest untapped market after China. There are some 12 million retail outlets deeply penetrated across the country and contributing to more than ten percent of the countrys GDP. Hence within the last few years an immense growth has been witnessed from the retail sector. Because of the global market impact there has been a lot of change in the consumers income levels and life style and there by most of them like to maintain their living standards. Hence apparel retail outlets have lot of demand. In similar manner competition is also very high in retail sector. Therefore retailer has to differentiate himself amongst the other retailers. Hence a retailer should eye on few variables like store, display, merchandise, sales personnel, sales promotion & ad campaigns, billing and exchange. Because these variables play a major role in customers point of view i.e. these factors impact their shopping experience. As we know the phrase Customer is king the retailers have to understand the shopping behavior of customers and have to make the buyer satisfied, because end of the day satisfied customer becomes an asset to the organization i.e. satisfaction drives value to the firm. Customer satisfaction also leads to loyalty of the firm and can result in store patronage. Hence a study has been carried forward to know the overall shopping experience of the customers and their satisfaction levels towards that particular store. This study also aims to investigate the impact of various demographic variables like gender, age, income and marital status along with the retail variables on customer satisfaction towards the retail outlets.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
TYPES OF RESEARCH: Research was carried forward through a structured Questionnaire. This is a Descriptive study where Quantitative data was collected from the respondents. Quantitative research is about asking people for their opinions in a structured way so that we can produce hard facts and statistics to guide. To get reliable statistical results, its important to survey people in fairly large numbers and need to make sure they are a representative sample of our target market. Descriptive research is used to identify and obtain information on a particular problem or issue. With descriptive study, a more specific question would be the focus so the research would be compelled to collect data that addresses the specific question and would not have the luxury of altering the focus of the data being collected. SAMPLING PLAN: Convenience sampling is used in this study because sampling is selected upon convenience. This method is fast, inexpensive and easy. The sample size collected is 181. DATA COLLECTION: Primary data for the research was collected through a structured questionnaire based survey interview. After designing the questionnaire the responses were taken from people who had shopped from any apparel retail outlet in the past three months. The places visited for getting the responses were shopping malls like GVK one, Central, City Center, Lifestyle etc to ensure diversity of respondents. The data was taken from 181 respondents comprising of both the genders, young and middle aged people in different income groups with different marital status. This ensured that the responses are not biased towards any particular demographic segment.
SCALING TECHNIQUES Measuring the attitudes and the opinion of the customers is a highly difficult process and so scaling proves to be a useful technique. Scaling is a process of measuring the quantitative aspects of subjective concepts. A 5-point Likert scale was used to let the customers rank the different variables influencing satisfaction levels from 1-5, 5 being of the highest weight-age. 5. Excellent 4. Very Good 3. Good 2. Fair 1. Poor