Service in Sporting Goods

Service in Sporting Goods

Abstract

This study of the customer service for this specific sporting goods store will analyze customer's needs for their preferable shopping experience. This study compares and contrasts this store to other national chains in an attempt to quantify the quality of service given and what customer service means to each customer and what qualities they find most important. What we found was that in order to stay on top of the highly competitive market of sporting goods your company must constantly be aware of the consumers' needs and build relationships to increase customer loyalty.

Service in Sporting Goods

Customer service has come a long way in the past few decades. Prior to the 1990's the only way to achieve dialect with a company was through a telephone (Morris, 2013). Most customer service agents knew this and if they were having a bad day then your experience was most likely not pleasant because you needed them more than they needed you. From the late 1990's until now with the advent of the internet we progressed to email, chat, and now social media (Morris, 2013) and now customer service has become a priority for companies since information can spread like a wildfire and a negative review or comment about your organization seems to be worth more than 10 positive reviews or comments and can damage a company's reputation.

Customer service represents who the company is. Products are part of the package. Most products are non-exclusive and customer loyalty, which means customers will re-purchase products along with recommending the products and/or service to other people, is derived from good customer service and not just products and pricing (Westfall, 2013). One local survey stated that 86% of customers will pay a higher price for better customer service. (Westfall, 2013). An extreme and personal example is when I had Verizon cellular service. In my area Verizon hands down provides the best cellular service, but every time I called them about a mishap on my bill they acted like I was ruining their day by calling and instead of listening to my issues I was always wrong or lying, so I cancelled my contract and went with another service, and even had to pay over $400 to terminate early and was happy to do so because I was tired of the bad treatment. It might not have been the smartest thing to do financially but it felt like the right thing to do at the time. Do I miss the great cellular service of Verizon? Of course,

but I wouldn't let them have another dime from me because of a couple of employees with lousy customer service skills.

The sporting goods industry is very competitive. The products are very similar and offer many substitutes (Katrichis, 2002). The only way you can differentiate yourself as a sporting goods company is to offer something unique, whether it be some kind of marketing or a high level of customer service. Some stores have become specialty stores and others have focused more on apparel. These are both ways to differentiate your company from the competition. (Katrichis, 2002). Outdoors Inc., based in Memphis, Tennessee competes with other local sporting goods companies by offering superior customer service and hiring employees who are knowledgeable and experienced in the trade (Winburne, 2013). The trend in Memphis, and most likely the rest of the country, is that smaller retailers offer a closer customer connection than bigger stores and the bigger stores offer lower prices. Smaller companies tend to know more about the industry and attend more tradeshows and training events to understand the changes and policies affecting their business. Larger stores have higher turnover because employees tend to be younger and less experienced. (Katrichis, 2002) Both large and small retailers are however taking advantage of social media to keep in touch with their customer base (Winburne, 2013).

To find out how well your business is doing in the field of customer service we must find a way to measure any results we may have. The best way to achieve results is straight from the customer in the form of feedback. Customer feedback is vital to a business that competes in an industry with many substitutes. Feedback can either be positive or negative, but in any case it shows a customer's interest in the business and at the same time makes the customer feel special (Sanchez, 2013).

What we have done for our initial study is set up a survey on what customers feel is important to them and what they expect from your store in the service department. The survey was handed out to every customer during a random weekend and a sample of 31 responses will be used in this report. Our survey asked the customer what qualities of customer service they find most important from the following five attributes: Assurance; how trustworthy the service is and the ability to be honest, credible and have the customer's best interest. Empathy; Understanding and knowing the customer and making an effort to understand the customer's needs and providing attention and recognition. Reliability; The ability to perform the service for a customer in a dependable and accurate manner. Responsiveness; The willingness and readiness of employees to help customers promptly. Tangibles; The appearance and how appropriate and professional the tools, service and personnel are. This survey is the focus of this report and is detailed in the demographic analysis.

Demographic Analysis

For the demographic analysis, I used the data from thirty-one judges (10-40) who ranked the importance of five different characteristics of customer service that were the most important to them using the numbers one through five with one being the most import and five being the least. Using Kendall's W, which is a test to find how much each judge is in agreement to each other and scales from zero to one with zero being not at all in agreement and 1 being in total agreement. After using Excel and the built-in formulas I summed up the total of each characteristic and found the