Shoppers' evaluation of service quality and its impact on shopping centre management

Abstract

The paper aims at exploring the shoppers’ evaluation of service quality and its impact on shopping centre management. For shopping centre management team, understanding their customers’ perceptions of the centre’s service quality is an important issue as shoppers’ evaluations and perceptions is believed to be highly related to their patronage behaviors and purchase intention. Through a case study of a shopping centre, this research will try to offer some insights on the relationships between evaluations of service quality and the shoppers’ patronage behaviors which may derive some implications for contemporary shopping centre management.

Literatures tell us that people elicit behavior after cognitive processing and formation of emotions. Adopting similar concept, marketing scholars found that customer behaviors are affected by their evaluations of service quality and satisfaction level through their perceptions on product or service attributes in cognitive processing. This study will follow the direction with reference to this model of behavior formation.

In the case study, personal interviews had been conducted with selected shoppers at a shopping centre. They were asked to rate the performance of 36 sub-attributes of the shopping centre under 5 shopping centre attributes, namely “accessibility”, “merchandise”, “retail environment & design”, “services of centre’s staff” and “promotions”. They were also asked about their patronage behaviors at the shopping centre such as frequency of visits, duration of visits, amount of spending etc.

It was found that the shoppers generally had positive evaluations on the centre’s performance on the 5 shopping centre attributes as a whole, especially had high evaluations on “accessibility”, “merchandise” and “services of centre’s staff”. Importance-performance analysis (IPA) was conducted to evaluate the service quality of 36 sub-attributes by comparing shoppers’ perceived actual performance and the importance level. It was found that only 8 sub-attributes, such as “access by public transportation”, “variety of stores” and “quality of stores” were found with high perceived service quality with high perceived actual performance and high importance level to the shoppers compared with other sub-attributes.

These sub-attributes with high perceived service quality were tested with occurrence tendency of patronage behaviors in the correlation analysis. It was found that high perceived service quality on merchandises, facility management and organization of promotion activities to certain extend had influence on manipulating patronage behaviors. However, some results showed that sub-attributes with high perceived service quality showed minimal or even no correlation on any measure patronage behavior parameters.

With reference to the model of purchase behavior regarding perceptions of service quality, the study may reveal that many possible antecedents of formation of shopping centre patronage behaviors may be still unreached in the contemporary studies.