Abstract

Retailing business is a highly competitive industry. The awareness of the customer needs shift is necessary for management system adjustment at each individual retail store, or even in the whole industry. The manager team has to grasp the real needs of customers, and then provide the right service for products. How to discover the real expectation of customers, and establish a good measuring mechanism are the issues of this research.
From the survey of quality measurement methods in service operations, we find a direct use of Likert scale in traditional way having some inappropriateness. This research is intended to find out a new mechanism for more information exploring when we have survey data about service operations on hand.
We adopt concepts from Fuzzy theory, and develop a new two factor evaluation schema for this purpose. We also modify the SERVQUAL form to help the data collection. Totally, we survey 4 types 29 retail stores, obtain 1376 good questionnaire samples, and then make a comparison.
Our major findings are: (1) the effectiveness and importance data of service attributes surely show a negatively skew phenomena; (2) two-factor fuzzy method shows better interpretation than the traditional direct use of Likert scale data.
Our research indicates that this two-factor method has potential to discriminate the service quality among different stores with better data manipulation.