Determinants Of Customer Retention - A Comparative Analysis Of Organized And Traditional Retailers

摘要

As of 2013, India's retailing industry was essentially owner manned small shops. Gigantic discount chains such as supermarkets, discount stores, department stores, catalogue showrooms can threaten a traditional department store chain and a small grocery store while hypermarkets are a favorite type of retail store because of lower price and convenience. Such stores affect traditional stores negatively. This study was conducted with the objectives of examining whether there is homogeneity among the organized and traditional retailers, customer retention strategies in terms of customer comfort and customer satisfaction and identifying the factors influencing customer retention in organized and traditional retail business. This study was conducted in four fast growing retail locations of north Tamilnadu namely, Chennai metropolitan, Suburban of Chennai, Vellore and Coimbatore. Factor analysis, cluster analysis and regression analysis were used for data analysis. This study reveals that around 14 factors were important in the context of customer retention. Out of all these factors, four factors were statistically significant. This implied that all the four factors such as business formation, location, business expansion and working hours had relatively strong influence on customer retention in traditional retail outlets. Whereas, three factors such as location, business performance and pricing were turned out to be statistically significant for organized retail which implied that all these three variables were important for customer retention in these formats of retail outlets. Similarly, the two categories of retailers exist in study locations give importance to customer comfort and customer satisfaction. This study also reveals that, traditional retail outlets have to concentrate on more factors on customer comfort and customer satisfaction categories in order to get more customer retention. Hence it is recommended that, traditional retailers have to improve their additional facility for sustaining in the market and competing with organized retail outlets.