ASSESSMENT OF SERVICE QUALITY IN APPAREL RETAILING-A STUDY OF THREE SELECT CITIES

The Indian Retail Industry is rapidly transforming and is the fastest growing sector contributing 10 percent of the country’s GDP. Indian retail market is estimated to grow from $427 bn in 2010 and expected to reach $637 bn by 2015 (Srivastava 2008). Indian apparel retailing is the country’s largest opportunity for the organized retailers after food retailing. In today’s competitive environment and with the growing importance of services, delivering high quality services has become the basic retailing strategy. The present paper studies the impact of service quality on apparel retail customer satisfaction and also indentifies the critical factors of service quality from customer’s perspective. The sample consists of 300 respondents from the popular cities with evidence of high Retail Growth in the state Andhra Pradesh in India. A structured questionnaire was administered for data collection. The results will help the Retail service managers to plan and design their service strategies.