2.

INTRODUCTION
Executive leaders across all industries continue to face market challenges.
Competition continues to accelerate; and, in retail, large chain stores compete by
aggressively buying market share through acquisition, while small specialty and pop-
up stores often lack the cost efficiencies of their larger competitors. New digital
buying options fragment the retail purchase process, giving customers the ability to
shop anytime, from anywhere. Digital shopping opportunities make it challenging for
retailers to keep and build store traffic without big price incentiveshowever, these
discounts can hurt overall profitability.
While retail sector in India is emerging as one of the largest sectors in the economy,
by 2015, the total market size is estimated to be around US$ 600 billion, thereby
registering a CAGR of 7.45 per cent since 2000. Moreover, retail industry is expected
to grow to US$ 1.3 trillion by 2020, registering a CAGR of 9.7 per cent between
2000-2020. At the same time, they create new formats and reformat old stores in an
effort to balance revenue generation with cost control. And, as customer retention
and acquisition become more important, retailers struggle to understand how to
create opportunity from each customer interaction. Retailers often find that creating
that interactive dialogue with customers can be difficult to implement within a
timeframe that makes sense to that customer and their experience. In this new
environment, many retailers find themselves moving away from the traditional focus
on increasing year-over-year same-store sales. They are putting more effort toward
building customer satisfaction, loyalty and overall lifetime value. Becoming more
customer-centric requires retailers to engage in ongoing two-way dialogues with
customersshifting the focus from campaigns to customer lifetime value. And being
customer-centric requires knowing each customer, and being able to interact with
them in a way that reflects their preferences, their past behavior, and their
anticipated next behavior. The numbers of touch points per customer is exponentially
larger than even a decade ago. This provides retailers with more data to work with in
trying to build more profitable relationships with their customers.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES:
1) To Identify the factors affecting retail customers
2) To study the retailing mix with customer decision making
3) To develop a strategic plan to improve retailing processes

3. LITRATURE REVIEW
4. IDENTIFICATION OF RESEARCH GAP & PROBLEM
In the past, price, promotion and assortment planning was done on a category-by-
category basis. But, customers dont think about buying individual items from
individual categories. They shop across multiple categories with a host of different
agendas. In todays increasingly sophisticated market, advanced analytical
techniques coupled with powerful, cost effective computational abilities, retailers can
factor in the customer perspective from the earliest stages of the planning process.
These customer insights can play an integral role in determining price, promotion
and assortment plans. This comprehensive, bottom-up approach ultimately creates
price, promotion and assortment plans that best satisfy customer needs while
achieving, with confidence, merchandising objectives and targets. In India,
Supermarket retailers are large retail stores specializing in groceries, produce,
meat, dairy products and a wide variety of non food products which operate
on a self-service basis with a central checkout. They are located in or near
residential high streets, where customers do their shopping more than once a
week driven by a combination of good prices, overall shopping experience and
convenience, product range and quality. Arnold (1997) states that location of a
supermarket-is the most important attribute considered by a customer in
choosing the shop where he would shop the most. Huffs (1964) gravity
Model of retail attraction provides support for this argument. Further research
also goes on to reveal that location of a Supermarket spells its success or failure
and being at the right place at the right time facilitates attainment of competitive
Advantage.

Service Quality refers to the identifiable, but sometimes intangible activities

undertaken by a retailer in conjunction with the basic goods and services he sells.
Experts like Berry (1986) and Dotson and Patton (1992) opine that service
quality has invariably been a critical aspect for achieving differential advantage.
With service quality as the cornerstone of a retail strategy, five popular measures of
SERVQUAL developed by Parasuraman, Zeithmal and Berry (1991) including
tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy have now
become important for every retailer in our country.

Retail Environment refers to the physical appearance of the retail store which is
divided into two parts -external environment, that part of the store visible prior
to entry into retail sales and service area (parking lot, facade, entrance, etc)
and the internal environment, that part visible from retail selling space
(including decor, color, lighting, layout, background music, product arrangement,
billing counters, etc,). Several studies were also done based on the literature
of retail environment which revealed that customers attitude towards the store
appearance had a direct effect on loyalty towards the store.

Product Assortment was found to be the single most important driver for choice
between retail formats as per the research done by Sologard and Hansun
(2003). For supermarkets in India in wide product assortment is a must
because most of the retail customers today look at supermarkets as on one-
stop-shop for all their requirements. In fact, customers get disappointed if the items
that they are looking for are out of stock.

5. EXPECTED IMPACT ON ACADEMICS/ INDUSTRY

Supermarket retailers in India are growing at a robust speed and with the entry of
foreign players into this retail format competition has become even fiercer among the
players. The Only means of survival is through attainment of competitive Advantage.
Retailers put a significant amount of effort into planning their business such as
writing business plans that include detailed descriptions of the mission, the products
and services it plans to offer, and how it plans to achieve profitability. Businesses
sometimes become too focused on their own inner workings and ignore the wants
and needs of customers. "Customer-centricity" is a business strategy that involves
looking at a retail from the perspective of customers.

One advantage of customer-centricity is it can allow retailers to recognize and take

advantage of opportunities for growth, such as unfulfilled customer needs. Another
potential benefit of a customer-centric business strategy is that it can increase
customer satisfaction. The purpose of customer-centricity is to find out what
customers like and don't like, and to tailor products and services to better fulfill those
needs and eliminate sources of irritation.

In facilitating the same, this research proposes a customer-centric strategy which

emphasize on continuous customer satisfaction and loyalty as being more
meaningful than market share.
6. METHODOLOGY OF THE RESEARCH WORK
On the basis of past studies, following hypotheses are proposed:

H1: Cross-channel marketing can contribute significantly for enhance customer

centricity in retailing

H2: Centralizing e-commerce and in-store transaction data in a central database will
positively affect the customer centricity in retailing.

H3: Linking social media activity to their customer data files will improve the
customer centricity in retailing.

H4: Integrating business functions across channels positively supports the customer
Centricity.

The research design used for this study is descriptive and a quantitative research.
The sampling technique used Convenience Sampling with the subgroups identified
as a representative of the entire population. In 1989, Weisberg & Krosnick describes
that statistical surveys are used to collect quantitative information about items in a
population. The study was carried out in Delhi-NCR, an excellent site for such a
study, as the capital of India which is a home to nearly all retailing organization. One
of the purposes of this study is to improve the service quality of retailing. This
research describes a study undertaken to understand the retailing service quality of
organized retails to enhance customer centricity. In this study, subjects are shoppers
of organized retails who will specifically asked about the service quality of the
retailers.

SERVQUAL is the most extensively used service quality measurement instrument

because of easiness to use, possession of simple structure and capabilities of
generalization. Therefore, understanding the suitability SERVQUAL tool will be used
for data collection.
Normally, two approaches such as quantitative and qualitative are adopted for
conducting a scientific research. According to Holme & Solvang (1997), both
methods have advantages and disadvantages where selection should be based on
the purpose of the study. A quantitative method is formalized and structured by
surround information that can be measured and valued numerically. A quantitative
approach is usually applied when the purpose is to verify existing theories or test
hypotheses developed based on previous research. On the other hand, qualitative
research methods are well suited to the characteristics of services because they fit
into gathering data on dynamic, experiential processes. The present study will use
both type of data.

Data Collection Method According to Arbnor & Bjerke,(1994 ),data sources are
classified as being either primary sources or secondary sources. Primary sources
are directly related to the study purpose. A primary data consists of all the data
collected throughout the study that directly can be related to the study purpose, both
personally gathered as well as data from a third party that has been collected with
equivalent purpose. The secondary sources like past studies and archives will be
accessed from various databases like books and articles in order to obtain some
reliable literature and empirical findings that can be applied in order to have better
understanding the service quality construct and how the SERVQUAL model can be
used to measure it. Throughout the study, both primary and secondary data sources
will be used.

Measure Instrument Questionnaires will be designed according to the SERVQUAL

model of measuring service quality expectations and perceptions (Parasuraman et
al., 1988). The survey instrument used is a structured questionnaire consisted of
three sections namely A, B, C section. Section A contained demographic data about
the respondents. While question of section B and C are the main parts of the
questionnaire that comprises of 41 questions each aimed at finding the respondents
opinions pertaining to the expectations and perceptions of service quality in retailing.
Section B is aimed at measuring the expectations of the respondents. The
statements are coined in such a way that they show their expectations about retailing
services. Section C will measure perceptions. These are the statements relate to the
feeling about retailing organization for which respondents are expected to rank these
statements. It will consisted of 41 perception item extracted from the original
SERVQUAL scale and modified to fit into retail services context. These statements
were developed by Parasuraman et al., (1988).

The questionnaire will be tested to identify whether the questionnaire is able to

capture the required data as expected by the researchers. The test will be conducted
mainly to find out whether our questionnaire is easily-understandable as well as
whether there are any vague and confusing questions in the questionnaire. The
validation of survey instrument will be checked through pilot testing of 50
respondents and variables will be finalized after ensuring the balanced approach and
objectivity of the survey.

Study will be carrying out a quantitative research and this will involve some
quantitative analyses with the use of statistical tools (descriptive and inferential).
There are several software packages for the analysis of quantitative data some of
which are broader in scope and user friendly like the SPSS. The data were analyzed
through various statistical tools, account of which has been given below:

Tabular analysis will be carried out to study the respondents demographic profile
and various service encounters experienced by them.

For prioritizing the different dimensions of SERVQUAL, each of the five dimensions
will be weighted according to customer importance, and the score for each
dimension multiplied by the weighting.

7. MAJOR INPUT (INFRASTRUCTURE) REQUIRED

The study doesnt require any specific lab or scientific tools. Being a behavioral
research, the study will require SPSS equipped computer for data analysis purposes
and data collection monetary & human resources.

8. Bibliography
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9. TIME & PHYSICAL PROGESS OF
WORK: Task Name
Activity
PERT of Research Work No. Duration
SW EW
Redefine SW: Activity Starting
Problem Week
EW: Activity Starting
2 4 Week
8 12

Reset Re-set
Literature Research Hypothesi Research
Survey Questions s Designing 1st Draf
1 12 3 8 4 4 5 4
0 12 13 20 21 24 25 28

Sampling
6 8
32 40

Questionnaire
Questionnair Pilot Revised
e 1st Drafing Study Drafing Questionnaire Approval
7 8 8 16 9 4 10 32
41 48 49 64 65 68 41 72

Data Data Data

Processing Compilation Collection Survey Planning
2nd Draf
14 4 13 8 12 32 11 4
121 124 113 120 81 112 73 76

Data Result Report Report

Analysis Drafing Drafing Submission
 15 12 16 8 17 12
121 136 137 144 145 156