I. INTRODUCTION

In today's competitive environment, every business looks for opportunities to stand out from the rest. One of the ways one can differentiate business is by providing superior customer service. Customer service is more than merely selling skills. While selling skills focus on making or closing the sale, customer service concentrates on the total relationship you maintain with customers.

Retailing is one of the world's largest industries. It is in a permanent state of change, and the pace of this change has been accelerating over the last decade. Retail outlets are the main source of purchase for consumers. Retailing is the final stage in the distribution process (from manufacturers to consumer), in which the retailer, as an intermediary, collects an assortment of goods and services from various sources and offers them to the customer.

Measuring and improving service performance is an essential strategy for success and survival in today's competitive situation, as service industries are sprouting at an incredible rate. Customer satisfaction is perceived to be a key driver of long term relationships between retailers and customers, especially when customers are well acquainted with products and markets and when industries are highly competitive. Services efficiency is one of the principal factors which influence customer satisfaction in a business to business context and help building customer retailer relationship.

Retailers are always looking around them to find out some strategies to differentiate their outlet or store from their competitors because of the fierce competition climate. One possible and important strategy is focused on providing high quality customer services. Customer services can be one possible competitive advantage for companies in all resorts. Customer service is the set of activities and programs undertaken by retailers to make shopping experience more rewarding for their customers. These activities increase the value customers receive from the merchandise and services they purchase. All employees of the retail firm and all elements of retail mix provide services that increase the value of merchandise. The services that a retail store can offer include acceptance of credit cards, alteration of merchandise, assembly of merchandise, ATM terminals, check cashing, child care, home delivery, demonstration of merchandise, display, dressing rooms, extended store hours, signage.

The challenges of providing consistent hi - quality service provides an opportunity for the retailer to develop sustainable competitive advantage. Small, independent retailers often attempt to develop a strategic advantage over large, national chains by providing customized customer service. Large chains can use their purchasing power to buy merchandise at lower prices than small local stores can. But small retailers can overcome this cost disadvantage by providing better customer service than a large, bureaucratic chain.

The aim of this paper is to present customer service as strategy for retailers especially in the unorganized sector so as to compete with the organized sector. Thus, the objectives of the present study are:

1. To analyze customer's expectations with respect to the service delivered to them at the unorganized retail stores.

2. To know the retailers view of using customer service as a strategy to create a competitive edge over the organized retailers.

II. LITERATURE REVIEW

Customer service includes all activities that enhance or facilitate the sale and use of the product. Like products, customer service gives firms the opportunity to gain market share and establish dominance in their industry (Kyz et al., 1989). Services are unique, and unlike industrial and consumer goods, services are intangible, heterogeneous and have a production inseparable from consumption (Parasuraman et al., 1988). Service value lies in the result of a process; the creation cannot be separated from the consumption. Furthermore services are not mass but individually produced, thus existing within the exchange between customer and company (Ghauri and Cateora, 2006).

Customer service as defined by Kotler (1994) is "the level of the person's felt state resulting from comparing a product's perceived performance (or outcome) in relation to the person's expectations. Basically this means that a customer's perception, which may or may not be what actually occurred, of the entire shopping experience is compared to the customers idea of what should have occurred. If the actual experience is less than the expected experience then the customer leaves with a sense of having received poor customer service. Customer services are everything, what company does for satisfaction of its customers. They help to gain higher profit from sold products. According to Bovee and Thill (1992), quality and customer services present strong barrier against the competition, ensure customer loyalty, differentiate product, decrease marketing cost and increase company profit.

Most research on customer perception of quality in the service industry has proven that focusing on perceptions of quality, value and satisfaction in service encounters has positive results for retailers. The retail industry is unique because it combines a product with service elements into the shopping experience. Often, dissatisfaction with the retailer has to deal with product dissatisfaction rather than the manufacturer, resulting in more customer service mishaps with the end user (McGoldrick, 2001).

Karl Albrecht describes customer service as:

To deliver positive quality a business must come up with a result beyond their customer expectations.

Zeithaml & Bitner (1996) suggest that competitive equality has been reached with many manufactured goods. Technological superiority is increasingly more difficult to maintain as a lasting strategy and maintaining low prices is equally challenging as a differentiating strategy. Therefore, one potential competitive strategy is the development of a service strategy.

III. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The study is based on primary data collected from 60 respondents in Ajmer city comprising of 30 unorganized retailers and 30 customers. Customers usually see what they expect to see and what they expect to see is usually based on familiarity, past experience, or preconditioned set. In a marketing context, people tend to perceive products and product attributes according to their expectations (Leon G. Schiffman and Leslie Lazar Kanuk, 1999). Study includes 29 features of retail outlets having due importance for the retailers to rate or analyze themselves and also for customers to analyze the quality of customer service provided to them.

The data was collected on the basis of the questionnaire which was prepared after a detailed literature review on customer perception of service attributes of the unorganized retail stores. A detailed literature review suggested the customer service variables of relevance as far as unorganized stores are concerned some of such attributes are: easy accessibility, layout of the store, performance of service at right time, availability of merchandise, price consciousness, employees knowledge, cleanliness, quality of merchandise, store ambience, parking, provision for credit and credit cards, refund/exchange etc.

IV. FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS

The data collected from both the category of respondents was factor analyzed using principal component analysis method with varimax rotation. The resultant factors were identified using Eigen value greater than 1 criterion. The results for the retailer's survey showed the approximate chi – square value as 693.459 at 300 degree of freedom under the Bartlett's Test of Sphericity which is significant at 0.000 level implying overall significance of correlation matrix and the results for customer's survey showed the approximate chi – square value as 1219.752 at 406 degree of freedom under the Bartlett's Test of Sphericity which is significant at 0.000 level implying overall significance of correlation matrix.

The Kaiser - Meyer - Olkin measure of Sampling Adequacy was 0.527 for retailers and 0.782 for customers which is sufficiently large. Thus, factor analysis may be considered appropriate for analyzing the data. Further analysis was therefore carried out. In the final results, total 7 factors out of 25 from the retailers survey and 8 factors out of 29 from the customer survey have been extracted. Customers were asked to rate the expectation of customer service from the unorganized retail stores on five point scale and the owners of the retail stores were asked to rate their service on the five point scale as well.

a) Customer survey results

KMO and Bartlett's Test

Descriptive Statistics

Total Variance Explaine

Descriptive Statistics

Total Variance Explained

The results thus imply that the unorganized retail outlets have locational advantage as compared to the organized outlets but with respect to customer service they need to work more as the customers residing in Ajmer city are likely top be loyal to the unorganized store if the adequate amount of required service is provided to them. Thus the unorganized retail store owners need to strategically think on these aspects of customer service and frame the policies required to do so. Hence the unorganized stores need to upgrade their facilities at war footing to be able to compete with the organized retailers.

V. CONCLUSION

The unorganized/traditional retail stores and the organized modern formats have certain positive as well as negative aspects that draw or repulse a consumer from buying from them. The major aspects that have come out in this study is that the organized retailer is preferred for their cleanliness, offers, exclusive store brands whereas the unorganized stores are preferred because of their location and some of the offers that are not expected to be offered at the organized stores for example cash credit, etc.

The study is an attempt to reveal the fact that if unorganized retail store owners strategically think about providing customer service and it matches up to the expectations of the customers, the customer will definitely not switch over to the organized formats where he may get all he wants under one roof, but the choice of making selections at times is not as per the expectation which a customer gets from the unorganized stores.