Improving customer service performance within a food supplier‐retailers context

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a strategic approach to the improvement of customer service performance and apply it to a food supplier that distributes its products to food multiple retailers' stores (from now on, the term “retailers” instead of “food multiple retailers' stores” will be used to represent hypermarkets, supermarkets or neighbourhood stores).Design/methodology/approach – To attain the performance's enhancement, the requirements are: the identification, evaluation and selection of customer service elements and the establishment of measures as well as performance standards. To identify service elements, previous research and the food supplier's as well as the retailers' viewpoints were taken into consideration. To evaluate service elements, 40 retailers were asked to rate the elements' importance and the two competitors' performance. The usable questionnaires were subjected to correlation analysis, paired‐samples t‐test and multiple ANOVA. To select the appropriate service elements, on w...

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