Developing Service Quality for Lepistö Group Oy (Hintakaari)

In today’s competitive world service quality plays a vital role for companies. It is needed to understand customer’s expectations and perceptions of service quality. The main objective of this thesis is to find out customer satisfaction of service quality delivered to them during their shopping from Hintakaari grocery store. It is important to understand the gap between customer expectations and their perceptions of service quality from customers’ perspectives in order to improve the service quality to satisfy them. In grocery stores service quality is considered significantly important because it results in customer satisfaction, customer loyalty and profitability. Case study research methodology was utilized as research method in this thesis, which involved in- depth study of chosen case and found answers to the research questions and explained well the selected phenomenon. Data collection was based on mixed methods using both qualitative and quantitative methods in this research. Qualitative primary data has been collected through using interviews with management and staff in order to have their view point of service quality. Quantitative customer survey questionnaire was used to gather primary data from customer, in order to know customer perspective of service quality perceptions (satisfaction) and expectations of grocery store. Secondary data was collected from scientific journals, website and books of research scholars. The analysis of the results and finding provided customers’ experience (perceptions) and expectations of service quality. The SERVQUAL model was applied to measure service quality and the result showed that customers’ expected service quality is higher than their experienced ones. Management should try hard to bring improvements in all dimensions, where expectations are higher. This Master’s thesis provides a complete understanding of customers perceptions (satisfactions) and expectations of service quality in Hintakaari grocery store so that commissioner can utilize SERVQUAL model to measure customers’ perceptions and expectations of service quality. It also gives the commissioner the possibility to find out the gap of service quality between provider and customer