Determinants of Retail Service Quality: An Exploratory Factor Analysis Approach in Supermarket Context

Abstract

The world is getting hyper-competitive and consumer trends are evolving in quality traits, hence the Retail Service Quality (RSQ) has become one of the most popular areas of academic investigation. For that reason, this paper seeks to identify empirically the factors which influence the Retail Service Quality of supermarket in the Sri Lankan context. In order to explore the determining factors of RSQ, exploratory factor analysis has been used to analyze the data. The sample of this study comprised 500 customers of selected supermarkets in Jaffna and the data was collected through a self-administered questionnaire which was designed from previously validated scales. At the same time, this questionnaire was constructed with 30 retail service quality items covering 5 RSQ dimensions. The findings suggest that, five identified factors/components are significantly influence on RSQ in the supermarket industry in Jaffna Sri Lanka.  Further, the study empirically proved personal interaction, convenience, problem solving, policy, and appearance are the main motivators of RSQ in the customers’ view which have been detected by exploratory factor analysis. Further, results revealed that dimensions extracted from the analysis accounted for 57.630 percent of the total variance. Moreover, the research provides insight into the development of measures for RSQ, and the relationships between RSQ and its determinants.

Keywords: RSQ, Exploratory Factor Analysis, Supermarket, Sri Lanka