A Study on Customer Experience Management as a Strategy for Hypermarkets in South India

Abstract

Value for money spent is what shoppers in any country seek and Indian consumers are no exception. As a result, there is a huge influx of customers to any new value retail outlet that comes up. In India, Hypermarkets are in city centers due to various reasons like poor transportation facilities, unwillingness of customers to travel long distances etc. Therefore, they compete with all formats like Supermarkets, Department stores and Specialty stores in organized sector and millions of independent grocery shops. All the retailers are waging a price war to woo customers. This brings down the competitive edge hypermarkets have over other format retailers in lowering prices. To compete effectively, hypermarkets have to differentiate and survive from the competition. This study focuses on customer experience management as a differentiating strategy. This study analyzed the customer experiences in various hypermarkets and emphasized the need for improvement across various customer touch points to provide a memorable shopping experience. The study revealed that, the new age customer is looking for various factors like ambience in the store, staff interaction levels, and billing speed in addition to product quality and price. But the irony is that, most of the retailers are still using strategies that are not customer centric, thus not meeting the customers' expectation.