Research On The Relationship Between Service Quality And Customer Loyalty For Fresh Food Retailers Background Of New Retail

The integration of online and offline development of fresh food retail industry in the context of new retail is getting closer and closer.Due to the perishable,fragile and time-sensitive nature of fresh produce,improving the level of service quality has become a key initiative for fresh produce retailers to win the competition and develop sustainably.In the context of product homogenization,supply chain transparency and diversification of customer needs,in order to attract new users and retain original users,major fresh food retailers are actively adjusting their competitive strategies,and more and more fresh food retailers are changing the focus of competition from traditional price and product to service.Some scholars have conducted a series of studies on the relationship between service quality of fresh food retailers on customer satisfaction and customer loyalty,but most of them focus on a specific part of the service process of traditional fresh food retailers and are limited to a single online or offline channel,while few of them consider the scenario of deep integration of online and offline channels in the context of new retail.This paper takes the SOR model as the basic theoretical framework and creatively introduces the PPM model;In constructing latent variables,it draws on the SERVQUAL model,a classic theory for evaluating service quality,and proposes measuring service quality from five dimensions: responsiveness,economy,experience,empathy,and reliability,starting from the driving factors;Starting from the lock-in factors,the lock-in factor dimensions were proposed,and these six dimensions were used as independent variables,customer satisfaction and customer inertia as mediating variables,and customer loyalty as the final variable,and nine research hypotheses were formulated;the hypotheses were tested with the help of structural equation modeling through 516 valid questionnaires collected from an extensive survey.The results showed the following : there is a positive effect of each dimension of service quality on customer satisfaction,lock-in factor on customer inertia,customer satisfaction on customer inertia,and customer loyalty,while the hypothesis of customer inertia on customer loyalty is not significant.Next,the questionnaires were selected from those who had purchase experience on Meituan Selection,Tmall,and Jingdong fresh food platforms,and the quadratic graph model was introduced to calculate the weights of the first and second level evaluation indicators respectively as the vertical coordinates of the quadratic graph model.Using the average of the consumer rating values of the indicators as the horizontal coordinate of the quadratic model,the final results were displayed in the quadratic graph,and the results showed that6 of the 20 secondary measures in this paper were located in the improvement zone.Finally,practical suggestions were made for fresh food retailers to further improve service quality and customer loyalty based on the research hypotheses and tetrad results.