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Research Article

An Exploratory Study on Customer Service Satisfaction Factors of Bookstores

Park, Gwangtae · Ahn, Yongdae

Published: January 1996 · Vol. 25, No. 4 · pp. 113-132
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Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the factors influencing customers' evaluation of service quality in bookstores, with the aim of providing better quality services to customers who patronize bookstores. To achieve this objective, relevant literature addressing quality management approaches across various service industries was reviewed, and hypotheses and a survey questionnaire were developed for this study. The empirical analysis based on the literature review was conducted by distributing questionnaires to bookstore customers and analyzing the results, with data analysis performed using the widely available SAS software. Through this analysis, the following results were obtained. First, bookstore service quality could be broadly categorized into factors related to employee attitudes, interior facilities and atmosphere, information provision, ease of product classification, product availability, and processing time. Second, regardless of bookstore size, employee attitude emerged as the most important factor determining service quality, followed by product availability and information provision as the next most important factors. Finally, all six factors representing bookstore service quality were found to have a positive (+) relationship with customer satisfaction with bookstore services. Among these, factors such as employee attitude and product availability were found to have significant effects even at the 5% significance level.