Total Quality Management Initiative in Supermarket with Special Emphasis on Customer Relationship Management in Maharashtra

Abstract

Earlier Total Quality Management (TQM) is used in manufacturing newlineorganizations to obtain a best quality product, however advent of competitive era this newlineTQM approach has become popular tool for almost every industry in various forms. newlineOne of the major components of TQM is CRM. The lack of understanding on newlineCustomer Relationship Management (CRM) is always a concern among the service newlineproviders especially retail outlet. There is always great anticipation for delivering newlinebest quality services form service segment of every industry, and supermarket is not newlinean exception. newlineIndian retail grocery industry has witnessed tremendous development in newlineterms of attractive store layouts along with good quality service and equally newlineexperiencing incredible competitors with the advent of mall and online shopping newlinetrend. Various retails organizations (traditional kirana shops) have adopted an up newlinegradation of traditional store formats to supermarkets. While doing so, these newlineorganizations encountered with major concern of not providing quality customer newlineservices at various levels. The quality at all levels can only be attained through newlineadoptions of quality management tools such as TQM and CRM. Therefore, it has newlinebeen attempted to study the effect of TQM implementation in SM with special newlineemphasis on CRM in Maharashtra. newlineThe present research explores the factors underlying TQM initiative into the newlineSM with special emphasis on CRM in Maharashtra. Data for present research has newlinebeen collected using a structured questionnaire and interview from the 18 SM s of 06 newlinedistricts of Maharashtra state. Delivery and collection questionnaire was used for newlinecollecting responses from 900 customers from different 06 cities and 18 SM were newlineretrieved using random sampling. newlineDescriptive statistics like frequency and mean have been computed to newlineunderstand the demographic profile and shopping pattern of customers. Inferential newlinestatistics like one sample t test has been used to analyse the collected data. newlinexiv newlineIndependent variables were store features, respondent s demographics, shopp