The effects of the current economic situation on customer satisfaction and retail patronage behaviour

Abstract

This study examines the factors that underlie store attributes and determines their influence on maximal customer satisfaction. First, we attempt to assess the differential influence of store factors on several customer subsamples that exhibit diverse retail patronage behaviour, a variable we operationalise as shopping frequency in accordance with relevant literature. Second, we aim to determine whether the economic downturn has exerted any influence on this relationship by collecting two comparable samples of consumers in different periods – one at the beginning of the crisis and one in the middle of the crisis. The findings highlight the importance of the proximity to home and customer attention attributes, and show that while in the beginning of the crisis a higher shopping frequency has a greater propensity to enhance the convenience, services and quality image factors, in the middle of the crisis the smallest number of factors contributing to satisfaction can be observed in the subsamples with the highest and lowest shopping frequency, respectively. The results thus suggest that the current economic situation is not contributing strongly to changes in consumers' patronage behaviours.

Keywords:

• maximal customer satisfaction
• food retailers
• store attribute perceptions
• retail patronage behaviour

Acknowledgement

A preliminary version of this article was published as Working Paper N. 02/2012 in the Working Papers Collection of the Cátedra Fundación Ramón Areces de Distribución Comercial, ISSN: 2253–6299.

Notes

Although superiority in customer satisfaction is always desirable, achieving levels of superiority in this variable makes it convenient to monitor the potential synergies and interrelationships with other business aspects. For example, as Anderson et al. (1997) find, excelling at both customer satisfaction and productivity is not always compatible, especially in certain business contexts (e.g. supermarkets). These authors identified tradeoffs between productivity and customer satisfaction, especially in sectors in which service by personnel plays a central role in customising a firm's market offering.

We selected this city for the study because its size is representative of most cities in Spain (La Caixa, 2008).