The Perceptios and Expectations of the Customers in Terms of Service Quality Where Service Companies and Retai

Abstract

This survey intends to find out consumers' expectations and perceptions about the service quality offered by service companies and retail outlets. A survey is applied to 470 respondents selected via stratified sampling from Ankara, the capital of Turkey with 4.5 million inhabitants. The respondents are required to answer 35 questions of which last five are related to demographic characteristics of these respondents. The rest 30 are statements which are designed to reflect the service quality perceptions of these people. The study consists of five parts. The first part is an introduction where the scope and the purpose of the study are concisely stated. The second part relates to the theoretical background of the subject matter and the prior researches carried out so far. The third part deals with research methodology, basic premises and hypotheses attached to these premises. Research model and analyses take place in this section. Theoretical framework is built and a variable name is assigned to each of the question asked or proposition forwarded to the respondents of this survey. 30 statements or propositions given to the respondents are placed on a five-point Likert scale where 1 represents strongly disagree; 2 disagree; 3 neither agree nor disagree; 4 agree and 5 strongly agree. The last five questions about demographic traits as age, gender, occupation, educational level and monthly income are placed either on a nominal or ratio scale with respect to the nature of the trait. Fiveresearch hypotheses are formulated in this section. The fourth part mainly deals with the results of the hypothesis tests and a factor analysis is applied to the data on hand. Here exploratory factor analysis reduces 30 variables to five basic components. KMO test of sampling adequacy and scale reliability test proved high scores as 0.855 and 0.806 respectively. In addition non-parametric biraviate analysis in terms of Chi-Square test is applied to test the hypotheses formulated in this respect. The fifth part is the conclusion where findings of this survey is listed.