Managing for Quality and Performance Excellence 10th Edition by James Evans ,William Lindsay

Exercise 13

Versitile Sporting Goods is a family-owned regional sporting goods store located in a small Midwestern town, and competes with a larger national sporting goods chain in a larger city about 40 miles away, as well as a local national retail "superstore" with generally lower prices. Versitile's specializes is athletic equipment, accessories, and clothing and it seeks to create a competitive advantage through high-quality customer service. Their vision is to be the "best-run sporting goods store in America." They hire people who are passionate about sports, engage in sporting activities so that they can better relate to the products and customers, and cross-train associates so that they have in-depth knowledge of all product lines, no matter what their personal interests are.
To better understand what customers value and how they perform relative to their competition, they conducted a survey to rate customers' perceptions for their store and their two main competitors on the following attributes (using a 1-7 Likert scale):
• Friendliness of employees
• Knowledge of products
• Helpfulness in selecting the right product
• Store layout
• Product availability
• Product quality
• Ease of checkout
• Overall customer satisfaction
• Willingness to recommend to others
a. Results from the survey, taken from a random sample of 50 customers per month for 12 months, can be found in the Excel file C03Data.xlsx on the Student Companion Site. Analyze the data in groups relating to employee attributes, store characteristics and customer attitudes. From your analysis, what might Versitile's do to create "exciters/delighters" that would help them compete with the larger national chain and the local superstore?
b. Using the five dimensions of service quality, what other attributes might the store include in the survey?