Developing customer convenience and experience through increased competency and efficiency: A strategic approach to retail operations mastery

Abstract

Retailers who are part of supply chains are crucial in attracting customers to physically visit their stores and thereby increase supply chain revenue. Retailers in supply chains are responsible for handling a high volume of transactions and high customer contact, thus better management of retail operations is necessary to provide greater convenience and experience for customers. In this regard, retail operations must be properly managed, particularly during times of crisis like COVID-19, to ensure that customers purchase their basic needs promptly and safely. Since customer contact is high, the retail operations can have a greater say in improving the customer convenience and experience but this perspective has not been specifically emphasized both in research and practice. Thus, the current study attempted to evaluate how well retail operations can improve customer convenience and experience so that retailers can do well even during times of uncertainty. The study, which is grounded in the resource-based view theory, thus looks at how well retailers' competency and efficiency in running the operations help in achieving better customer convenience and experience. In this regard, sample data from 416 practitioners belonging to the Indian retail industry has been selected to examine the mediating role of retailers' efficiency to retailers’ competence in achieving better customer convenience and experience. This study importantly confirms that while more competence can help retailers operate more efficiently, it cannot, by itself, provide customers with greater convenience or a better shopping experience. This study found that retailers concentrate on streamlining their operations in order to overcome capacity limits because it is expensive and limited. The empirical evidence shows that retail operations have significance say in offering better convenience and experience customers.