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Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor (TTL) Corporation was originally a state-own enterprise. Since 2002, this company has gradually transformed itself from monopoly to open market and the privatization in order to gain the competitiveness in Taiwan after the market openness in tobacco and general wines. With the market openness, it is critically important for TTL Corporation to provide better services for its retailers, such as traditional grocery stores, convenience stores, supermarkets, and so on, in this intensified market. Customer satisfaction is an overall attitude toward a product or service provider to see if the service quality meets customer needs (Lee, Chang, & Chen, 2013). In addition, measuring customer satisfaction is essentially important because increasing customer satisfaction enhances customer retention, repurchase frequency, profitability, and, eventually, customer loyalty. In fact, customer satisfaction is a key indicator to reflect if the provided service quality has been met (Orel & Kara, 2014).
Studies have shown that different demographic variables might perceive different service quality or satisfaction (Chen, Lee, Chen, & Huang, 2011; Chen, Tsai, Peng, & Wu, 2013; Wu & Hung, 2015). That is, it is of great importance for Taiwan Tobacco and Liquor Corporation to measure the retailers’ overall satisfaction and then further identify the service/satisfaction differences with different retailers’ demographic information. In practice, service quality (SERVQUAL) model proposed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Berry (1988) has been widely used to evaluate service quality or satisfaction for a wide variety of service industries (Lu & Wu, 2010; Shieh, Wu, & Huang, 2010; Abaria, Yarmohammadian, & Estekic, 2011; Udo, Bagchi, & Kirs, 2011; Wu & Hsieh, 2012; Mukhtar, Saeed, & Ata, 2013). Thus, this study uses SERVQUAL model as a basis to develop the questionnaire for the retailers through phone purchase in South Branch Office in Taichung City, Taiwan to measure the service quality and retailers’ satisfaction.
Analysis of variance (ANOVA) is typically applied to identify if different demographic variables perceive different service quality or satisfaction (Chen et al., 2011; Chen et al., 2013). In contrast, this study intends to use multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA). ANOVA is to analyze uni-response problems, but MANOVA uses the variance-covariance between variables to measure the mean differences with several correlated dependent variables (Wu, Hsueh, & Tsai, 2014). With the use of MANOVA, we can observe how different retailers’ demographic variables (independent variables) including the interactions of demographic variables impact different service quality or satisfaction items (dependent variables) as a whole. When critical demographic variable(s) and the interaction effects are found, Bonferroni test is applied in post hoc multiple comparison analysis to identify the differences on dependent variables.
This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews service quality, SERVQUAL model, and the relationships among service quality, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. A case study is described in Section 3. Finally, conclusions are summarized in Section 4.