Page 228 - DMGT522_SERVICES MANAGEMENT

Unit 10: Service Quality

brought in the much sought after footfall and took advantage of the “traffic”. Location Notes
by defining the catchments area for the store was a strategic issue. Central Bazaar
escaped the location trap by being “accessible” 24 × 7 to all people in the designated
suburbs of Mumbai: a phone call or a “click” was all it took to order, and the
merchandise was delivered by the retailer’s vans right at the doorstep.

No inventory: Central Bazaar does not exactly escape the inventory trap, but manages
to do better than other offline stores. It has a huge godown and warehouse, where it
stocks its 5,000-brand merchandise line-up, and from which its “pickers” select the
order items. What it escapes from is expensive interior décor, visual display and
merchandising, shoplifting, etc.?

Micro marketing: The delivery system enables Central Bazaar to get close to the
customer’s living environment for further interactions and micro marketing. The sales
call can become customised and the customer’s eyeball and attention can be garnered
exclusively and qualitatively for effective marketing and relationship building.
Customer psychographics: Receiving orders on the net or through the phone and
delivering the merchandise to their homes gives Central Bazaar an incomparable
advantage over other retailers in customer analysis. It has access to hitherto
unavailable data on the customer, including not only his demographic profile but
also his psychographics. Central Bazaar can now track the customer’s purchase
patterns, know his preferences, and get a glimpse of his perceptions, personality as
well as his attitude. This would undoubtedly make him tailor and customise his
retail marketing, including merchandise and promotion offers, retail communication,
and other value-added services.
Problem for Central Bazaar
Mr. Joseph Mathew, General Manager, Central Bazaar had a problem. He wanted, with
evangelical zeal that the unique service format should succeed. He not only wanted Central
Bazaar to have a distinctive market presence and mind share but also garner revenues,
market share and market size. He fully understood that there existed a linear relationship
between customer satisfaction and profitability. He dreaded the possibility of having
dissatisfied customers; but he was more scared; by the fact that he had no way of accessing
basic data about the dissatisfied customers; such as:
who they were?
Which aspect of Central Bazaar’s service they were dissatisfied with?
The degree of their dissatisfaction
Also, he realised, ensuring consistent service delivery implied was a way towards the
quality goal. His biggest problem was not only in measuring the quality of service delivery,
its consistency and customer satisfaction at Central Bazaar but also in finding comparable
benchmarks. He knew that customers compared stores, formats and different aspects of
the service retail-mix like merchandise, locations, layout, promotions and other
communications and the behaviour of the retail personnel. He also knew that this
comparison was crucial in building their preferences. Central Bazaar was a unique e-
tailer, with no known direct competition. He was up against retailers with different formats
- supermarkets, kirana stores and discount stores – but fighting for the same customers’
share of wallet and heart share. The undeniable fact was that the shopping experience in
Central Bazaar was definitely different from that of other “offline” format stores. ‘How do
you compare oranges with mangoes!’ he thought.
Question:
Can you find ways and means to measure quality in intangible offerings like services?

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