Research Proposal

Customer Satisfaction in Retail Super Market

Lecturer: Recardo Benzo

Nallathamby Vijayapaskar
CTL ID: 093377-81
UWL ID: 29002491
Title of the Research:
CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
“Analyses of what are the factors influencing in customer satisfaction in the retail
industry.”
Ex: ASDA

Research Background:
What is customer Satisfaction? This is a measurement that is used to find out what
are the products and services are fulfilled or satisfy the customer expectations. The
recent world is so competitive and has open market. In retail super market chain has
very high level of competition because there are some giant super markets on race and
thousands of corner shops are giving some pressure to them. The customer
satisfaction is the best business strategy to any growing business system. If any
company gain a high level of customer satisfaction they will be the number one in the
market and get more market share. All businesses are tried to attract the customer to
increase their business and profit. All business needs repeatedly customers, the
customer like to come to the shop or super market again and again. So the business
will get more customers through satisfy their needs like quality, deliveries, support
and good services. The customers always accepted and appreciate good services and
quality products with low cost. Gaining customer satisfaction is not an easier one.
Once a year or twice a year the company do the survey and measurement to find out
their customer satisfaction, opinions and their expectations. Then continuously
making changes in products, follow the standards, maintain the high quality,
innovation, increasing vast selection of products and giving a very good service then
the company can gain more customer satisfaction, get more customers and attract the
more people in the environment. In UK, the retail super market chain is the most
competitive and profitable business. But every giant super market gets a particular
market share in the whole market .(www.thetimes100.co.uk, 2010)

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Organisation Background:
ASDA is one of the giant supermarkets in UK and all over the world. ASDA means
Asquith Dairies. It was started in early 1920’s by a group of farmers in Yorkshire but
the ASDA was born in 1965. The main business area are retailing fresh and frozen
foods and groceries, home things, cloths, leisure and entertainment goods,
technological goods and pharmaceuticals. It holds approximately 17% market share in
UK market. It is the second biggest super market chain in UK. It is using low price
strategy and compare to other super markets holds bit high price of the products. It
maintains the low price for last 11 years; no one can beat their pricing because it
backs to its root of foot retailing in 1991. Now it is operated there are 243 super store
across the UK. ASDA given price guarantee where we can check the groceries price
in other super markets that we bough and CEO of the company says, “From today;
ASDA will not be beaten on price”. (http://your.asda.com, 2010) In 1999 it was taken
over by Wal-Mart Company based on America. There approximately 125000
employees are working in ASDA super stores and annual sales nearly $22 billion. It
maintains cheaper pricing than others. The market leader of Tesco holds 28% of
market share, Morisons and Sainsbury are the biggest competitor of ASDA. It is
providing online shopping and produce own George clothing production.
(www.corporatewatch.org.uk, 2004)

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Research Questions:
Research questions are guiding you to find out the results properly or it will help us to
do the research in a correct way.
 The important question is how they attract the people against the biggest
competition.
 How are they going successful
 What are different factors influencing in the customer satisfaction
 What are the services and activities provided by the company like offers,
pricing tactics, delivery services and better approach.
 How they sustain and maintain their particular customer satisfaction

Research Objectives:
 Understands and evaluate the term of customer satisfaction
 Explain how each and every factors taking part of customer satisfaction
 To explore How its affect the company success.

Literature Review:
All of the businesses are now competitor oriented business. So the companies are tried
to make some competitive advantages to manage the competition surround the
organisation. The customer satisfaction also acts as one of the competitive advantages
for any company because there is no business without customers. An organisation
focus on their existing customers at the same time they try to capture new customers
or attract the people then make them as customers of the company.
Before us designing our organisational strategy we must clear about our business,
who is our customers, value of the customers and what should our business be?
Customers are the major role of any business, so when we satisfy their expectations
we will gain more customers to our business. (Johnson. G & Scholes. K, 2003)
There are some competitive policies and common laws following by organisations to
improve the market competitiveness. So it will bring maximum benefits to consumers.
Before they go to the global market we will capture them to our business. They use
some tools like SWOT and five force analyses to find out their position in the markets
and their competitors’ strength and weaknesses. So when we approach a smooth way

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we will gain more satisfaction and it will establish a profitable and sustainable
position among competition. (Porter. M, 2004)
Customer satisfaction is the essential to survive and sustain the business. We need to
know the customers are satisfied or not so we have to ask them in the form of
question or survey. You can ask them face to face or email and mail the questionnaire
to fill it or call them over the phone, and then you can suggest what factors are
influencing in customer satisfaction. (Reh. F, nd)
An article says there are six factors influencing in the customer loyalty but we can
make positive customer loyalty through the customer satisfaction. Those are Core
offering like locations and services, satisfaction, elasticity level, demographics, the
market place and share of wallet. (www.thewisemarketer.com)
A study provide some factors that influencing in the customer satisfaction those are
capability of suppliers, technological aspects, cost, quality and the efficiency of the
product. Customers are mostly focus on supplier behaviour, it also influencing in the
customer satisfaction. (www.managementstudyguide.com)
And also we can use the customer satisfaction model (Kano. N, 1984) to find out the
factors. It consists in to three parts those are Basic factors, excitement factors and
performance factors. These three factors include all other factors which are influence
in the customer satisfaction.
A research of Greece retail industry proves the factors of pricing, quality of the
products, merchandising, and store atmosphere and store convenience are positively
related to the customer satisfaction. (Theodoridis. P & Chatzipanagiotou. K, 2009)
Another study proves that the brand loyalty is the only and important factor that
increases the customer satisfaction in the Chinese and the Korean industry. The survey
was taken from Tesco and Wal-Mart retail industries. There were some factors
analysed to find out the association with customer satisfaction those are customer
orientation, perceived service quality, satisfaction and brand loyalty. Within these
factors the brand loyalty shows more association with customer satisfaction.
(Youl Ha. H et al, 2008)
A research fails to prove customer satisfaction with evidence because the retail
industry running in a small town and they fail to satisfy the customer expectations and
they don’t have vast range of selection of products. The study proves the customers
strongly support their local retailers. (Lee. S et al, 2007)

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Methodology:
Here we designed some alternative hypothesis because we suggested some factors
that associates with customer satisfaction.
H1: the quality of the service affects the customer satisfaction
H2: the pricing tactics affects the customer satisfaction
H3: Staff qualities like response, kindly talking and friendly affects the customer
satisfaction.
H4: Vast selection of products affects the customer satisfaction.
H5: quality of the products affects the customer satisfaction
H6: Brand identity affects the customer satisfaction.
Research design:
It is a framework that is used to conduct the research and contains everything
that is use to do the research. I am going to use the exploratory research design
because it is a qualitative research and we can get more insight of the topic.
Data Collection Methods:
Data is used to gathering information to conduct the research. This kind of
research normally uses survey questionnaire methods because it is difficult to
predict the factors. It is a secondary active data collection method we are
going to use.
Data analysis:
There are number of data analysing methods available in reality. But in this
research we can use SPSS system, correlation co-efficient methods and
ANOVA method. Here I suggested that I am going to use correlation co-
efficient method because of the hypothesis. If there is a strong correlation
found that particular factor associated with customer satisfaction. If it is
negative correlation there is no relation between that factor and customer
satisfaction.

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Timescale:

Task November December

W1 W2 W3 W4 W1 W2 W3 W4
Selection of topic *

Information about research * * *

and organisation background
Design objectives and * * *
questionnaire
Gathering information about * * * *
Literature Review
Information about * * *
Methodology
Submission of Assignment *

References:

http://www.thetimes100.co.uk/theory/theory--customer-satisfaction--278.php,
December 15, 2010.
1. http://your.asda.com, 2010, ASDA fires final shot in supermarket grocery price
wars, [online], from URL: http://your.asda.com/2010/4/27/asda-fires-final-
shot-in-supermarket-grocery-price-wars, December 12, 2010.
2. Johnson. G & Scholes. K, 2003, Exploring corporate strategy, Ashok India
pvt Ltd, New Delhi.
3. Lee. S, Johnson. K & Gahring. S, 2007, “Small town consumers’
disconfirmation of expectations and satisfaction with local independent
retailers”, international journal of retail and distribution Management, vol-36,
no-2, March.
4. Porter. M, 2004, Competitive Advantage, Free press, New York.
5. Reh. F, nd, Customer Satisfaction Survey, [online], from URL:
http://management.about.com/od/competitiveinfo/a/CustomerSatSurv.htm,
December 19, 2010.

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6. Theodoridis. P & Chatzipanagiotou. K, 2009, “Store image attributes and
customer satisfaction across different customer profile within the super market
sector in Greece”, European Journal of Marketing, vol-43, No-5/6, pp-708-
734, January.
7. www.corporatewatch.org.uk, 2004, ASDA/ Wal-Mart a corporate profile,
[online], from URL:http://www.corporatewatch.org.uk/?lid=800, December
21, 2010.
8. www.managementstudyguide.com, 2010, Factors affecting the customer
satisfaction, [online], from
URL:http://www.managementstudyguide.com/factors-affecting-customer-
satisfaction.htm, December 20, 2010.
9. www.thetimes100.co.uk, 2010, Customer Satisfaction, [online], from URL:
10. www.thewisemarketer.com, 2007, The six key factors that influence customer
loyalty, [online], from URL: http://www.thewisemarketer.com/news/read.asp?
lc=w29860tx2320zs, December 16, 2010.
11. Youl Ha. H, Janda. S & Park. S, 2008, “Role of satisfaction in an integrative
model of brand loyalty”, International Marketing Review, vol-43, no-2,
September.