Quality Management and Customer Service Wal-Mart Case Study

Question: Discuss about theQuality Management and Customer Servicefor Wal-Mart Case Study. Answer: Service Provided by Wal-Mart: RATER and SERVQUAL Analysis Wal-Mart is an American retain chain store that sells everyday items including grocery, stationary, electronics and others. They also have an e-commerce system for delivering products directly to the addresses of the customers. The RATER and SERVQUAL Analyses on Wal-Mart are as follows. RATER RATER is an acronym for Reliability-Assurance-Tangibles-Empathy-Responsiveness. The RATER analysis on Wal-Mart is as follows. Reliability Wal-Mart is a reliable retailer and always delivers products to the customers on time. Wal-Mart provides best quality of products at the best prices to the customers in the retail stores or through e-commerce services (Tan, Benbasat Cenfetelli, 2013). Wal-Mart has earned reputation among regular customers in terms of reliability. Assurance Wal-Mart provides quality assurance to its customers as a part of its business plan. In case the quality of the delivered product is poor, Wal-Mart guarantees full cash-back or product replacement. For this, Wal-Mart has become very popular in its native country. Tangibles Wal-Mart provides best quality services in the tangibles. The physical retail stores have up-to-date facilities that provide excellent customer services. The customers can easily access the products of their need in the stores. Again, for the e-commerce, Wal-Mart provides very user-friendly interface that helps the online customers find their products very easily. Empathy Wal-Mart does not has much empathy in customer needs. Hence, they give full freedom to their customers for searching and finding the products of their need. They have a customer feedback service (Yee et al., 2013). From the customer reviews, they add or remove products from their inventories rather than just predicting the needs of customers and market demands. Responsiveness Wal-Mart has 24 hours customer services that response quickly to the customer calls and demands. The main duty of this customer service is to note the customer demands and complaints about faulty products that the company also replaces promptly. SERVQUAL SERVQUAL analysis is used to identify gaps in services that result in poor customer experience. The SERVQUAL analysis results on Wal-Mart are as follows. Gap between Management Perception of Customer Expectations and Customer Expected Service The management of Wal-Mart expects customers to find and chose required products on their own and has arranged products in retail stores accordingly (Jiang et al., 2012). However, the customer expects to find their products in a categorized manner i.e. they expect the company to create categories and arrangements for different types of products. Gap between Management Perception of Customer Expectations and Service Quality Specification Wal-Mart customers expect the company to reduce prices for different products while also getting the best quality while management thinks quality is sufficient to attract customers. Gap between Service Quality Specification and Service Delivery This gap arises because the company sometimes fails to match the demand and supply cycle of the market. Many times, the company failed to provide services to the customers due to low supply of products on their end (Basfirinci Mitra, 2015). Gap between Service Delivery and External Communication This gap appears in Wal-Mart because they sometimes fail to communicate to customers about low supply or quality of products. Gap between Expected Service and Experienced Service This is common in e-commerce site of Wal-Mart when the customer views and expects best quality products while on delivery receives low quality products. References Basfirinci, C., Mitra, A. (2015). A cross cultural investigation of airlines service quality through integration of Servqual and the Kano model.Journal of Air Transport Management,42, 239-248. Jiang, J. J., Klein, G., Parolia, N., Li, Y. (2012). An analysis of three SERVQUAL variations in measuring Information System Service quality.Electronic Journal Information Systems Evaluation Volume,15(2). Tan, C. W., Benbasat, I., Cenfetelli, R. T. (2013). IT-Mediated Customer Service Content and Delivery in Electronic Governments: An Empirical Investigation of the Antecedents of Service Quality.MIS quarterly,37(1). Yee, R. W., Lee, P. K., Yeung, A. C., Cheng, T. C. E. (2013). The relationships among leadership, goal orientation, and service quality in high-contact service industries: An empirical study.International Journal of Production Economics,141(2), 452-464.