C V Sunil Kumar, Agrawal Rohit
Operations Management and Quantitative Techniques, Indian Institute of Management, Bodhgaya, 824234, Bihar, India.
Heliyon. 2024 Aug 18;10(16):e36395. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2024.e36395. eCollection 2024 Aug 30.
Retailers who are part of supply chains are crucial in attracting customers to physically visit their stores and thereby increase supply chain revenue. Retailers in supply chains are responsible for handling a high volume of transactions and high customer contact, thus better management of retail operations is necessary to provide greater convenience and experience for customers. In this regard, retail operations must be properly managed, particularly during times of crisis like COVID-19, to ensure that customers purchase their basic needs promptly and safely. Since customer contact is high, the retail operations can have a greater say in improving the customer convenience and experience but this perspective has not been specifically emphasized both in research and practice. Thus, the current study attempted to evaluate how well retail operations can improve customer convenience and experience so that retailers can do well even during times of uncertainty. The study, which is grounded in the resource-based view theory, thus looks at how well retailers' competency and efficiency in running the operations help in achieving better customer convenience and experience. In this regard, sample data from 416 practitioners belonging to the Indian retail industry has been selected to examine the mediating role of retailers' efficiency to retailers' competence in achieving better customer convenience and experience. This study importantly confirms that while more competence can help retailers operate more efficiently, it cannot, by itself, provide customers with greater convenience or a better shopping experience. This study found that retailers concentrate on streamlining their operations in order to overcome capacity limits because it is expensive and limited. The empirical evidence shows that retail operations have significance say in offering better convenience and experience customers.
作为供应链一部分的零售商对于吸引顾客到实体店购物从而增加供应链收入至关重要。供应链中的零售商负责处理大量交易并与顾客进行高度接触，因此，更好地管理零售运营对于为顾客提供更大的便利和体验是必要的。在这方面，零售运营必须得到妥善管理，尤其是在像新冠疫情这样的危机时期，以确保顾客能够及时、安全地购买基本必需品。由于与顾客接触频繁，零售运营在提高顾客便利性和体验方面可以发挥更大作用，但这一观点在研究和实践中都没有得到特别强调。因此，本研究试图评估零售运营在多大程度上能够提高顾客便利性和体验，以便零售商即使在不确定时期也能表现出色。该研究基于资源基础观理论，着眼于零售商运营能力和效率在实现更好的顾客便利性和体验方面的作用。在这方面，选取了来自印度零售行业的416名从业者的样本数据，以检验零售商效率在实现更好的顾客便利性和体验方面对零售商能力的中介作用。本研究重要地证实，虽然更高的能力可以帮助零售商更高效地运营，但它本身并不能为顾客提供更大的便利或更好的购物体验。本研究发现，零售商专注于精简运营以克服能力限制，因为这既昂贵又有限。实证证据表明，零售运营在提供更好的便利性和顾客体验方面具有重要作用。
