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The purpose of this paper is to focus on the use of retail customer service as a value added component and potential success strategy for rural tourism retailers. More specifically, service quality expectations and perceptions as a means for segmenting tourism markets are to be examined.

Data were collected using a case study methodology in an established rural tourism community. Local customers, tourist customers, and retailers participated in the study. A canvassing approach was employed for administering a hand‐delivered, self‐report survey that examined parallel sets of service quality expectations and perceptions among the three groups, along with service satisfaction outcomes (i.e. retailer loyalty and purchase intentions). Descriptive analysis, factor analysis, t‐tests, and regression analysis were conducted.

Local and tourist customers' prior expectations for retail service quality were similar; however, local and tourist customers' post‐experience service quality perceptions differed significantly. A modified version of the SERVQUAL scale represented two service quality perception constructs important to local customers and retailers and one service quality perception construct for tourist customers.

Generalizability of findings may be limited as the in‐depth study was conducted within a single rural tourism community in Iowa.

The study sheds light on service quality perception dimensions that are salient to local customers, tourist customers, and retailers. Results aid in the development of customer relationship management strategies for both local and tourist customers and enhanced competitive options for rural tourism retailers.

Findings provide baseline information regarding customer relationship management strategies aimed at establishing rural tourism retailer sustainability by simultaneously meeting service expectations and enhancing service perceptions for local and tourist customers.

The delivery of high-quality service is critical for the success, or otherwise, of many retailers. However, despite calls to examine the efficacy of the dimensions of quality in different service contexts, it is still largely unknown how dimensions such as empathy and responsiveness interact to determine consumers’ perceptions of service quality. Recent research also suggests that loyalty strategies may not be equally effective across all services contexts. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to contribute to the service quality literature by providing a better understanding of how marketing strategy is effectively operationalised into improved services and consumer loyalty in physical stores.

Consumers from ten stores of one pharmacy retailer were surveyed. The retailer provides high-service levels at present and is examining ways of how to deliver a better quality service to its prescription and non-prescription account holding consumers. By examining consumer loyalties in high-services contexts in pharmacy retailing, the authors also propose how retailers in other sectors can learn to operationalise services quality into increased loyalties.

The findings of this research demonstrate that empathy, rather than responsiveness, is more important in a high service delivery context such as pharmacy retailing. Non-prescription account holding and non-store loyal consumers also do not perceive that high service responsiveness is compromised by offering of a highly empathetic (and possibly more time consuming) service by the retailer.

These findings present specific implications for retailers in the development of consumer loyalty in a high-service context. Moreover, the findings of this research also illustrate how retailers can more effectively target their investments in service design to enhance service quality and consumer loyalty.

The growth in online shopping has presented challenges for physical distribution service quality (PDSQ) provided by retailers, including both multi‐channel and pure players, and logistics service providers (LSPs). Issues emerging from a consumer survey regarding electronic physical distribution service quality (e‐PDSQ) informed this paper's research, which aims to consider this phenomenon.

The research study employed qualitative interviews with retailers, logistics service providers and experts to consider the consumer survey findings and discuss the current market situation and suggestions for improvement.

Interviewees confirmed that pure players offer better e‐PDSQ than multi‐channel retailers as well as important constructs of availability, time, condition and returns regarding this phenomenon, but also raised issues of relationships between retailers and LSPs and costs regarding service trade‐offs.

The research undertaken was exploratory and will require further and wider testing in other contexts and geographical areas to assure external validity.

The findings have strategic importance for online retailers and LSPs to achieve competitive advantage and offer superior customer service.

This paper extends earlier, limited work on e‐PDSQ and considers retailer and LSP points of view concerning previous research into consumer expectations and perceptions of e‐PDSQ.

Presents the findings of a survey carried out among the financial directors of leading retail companies in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the UK. The purpose of the survey was to determine those factors that influence the development of financial services within retail organisations. Considers the introduction of financial services, within the context of retailers’ relationships with their customers, and retailers’ ability to build closer relationships with existing and potential customers. Financial service provision is, therefore, considered in the context of the relationship marketing paradigm. Considers the opportunities which financial services provide for retailers to move from a transactional to relationship approach to marketing.

To examine the service performance of a number of internet retailers and to identify differences (if any) in internet retailers' service performance across a series of attributes based on consumers' assessments.

To compare the perceived service performance across internet retailers with respect to several areas: core service performance, web site features, recovery service, consumer satisfaction and intentions. A structured questionnaire was used to gather the data. The internet retailers are two budget airline retailers, a book retailer, and a multi‐channel bank.

Internet retailers' service performance was generally at an acceptable level. The variation of their online service performance was dependent on industry factors and the effectiveness of online service management. Consumers' perceptions of the internet retailers' performance were significantly different on several service attributes. However, consumer online service satisfaction levels across internet retailers were similar.

Convenience sampling and the limited number of internet retailers do not permit results to be generalised to the larger population. Future investigation with a larger sample could provide a more comprehensive coverage.

Provide useful information for internet retailers who plan to improve their service performance. This study indicated that retailers' experience from managing the physical store‐based retail service might not contribute towards their online service performance.

This paper analyses service performance of different retailers in the same industry or across industries to provide valuable indication of online service performance and attributes that contribute to differential performance levels.

This study investigates the impacts of return channel type on the relationships between return service quality (RSQ) and customer loyalty (CL) in an omnichannel retailing environment.

Data comes from Chinese customers having a return experience in omnichannel retailing that uses the channel type of both buy-online-return-in-store (BORIS) and buy-in-store-return-to-online warehouses (BSROW). The authors use the structural equation modeling to test the hypotheses and the bootstrapping method to test the mediation and moderation effect.

For BORIS channel, satisfaction of customer returns (CRS) partially mediates the relationship between convenience and CL, and fully mediates that between CL and responsiveness, transparency and competence, respectively. For BSROW channel, CRS partially mediates the relationship between responsiveness and CL, and fully mediates that between CL and convenience, transparency and competence, respectively. The mediation effects indicate that omnichannel customers may feel more satisfied due to higher omnichannel fulfillment (responsiveness and convenience) and omnichannel trust (transparency and competence) provided by retailers. Return channel type moderates the relationship between RSQ-convenience and CL. The results show the different expectations between BORIS and BSROW customers in the return process.

This paper serves as a pioneering study to apply cognition-affect-behavior paradigm into the field of return management in omnichannel retailing.

The findings suggest retailers develop their strategies on customer returns and post-sales service quality improvement in the omnichannel. Also, retailers should develop an integrated return system across channels to provide convenient service to BORIS customers and quick response to BSROW customers.

Studying return service management in the omnichannel from customer's cognition appraisal, this study contributes to the literature of the reverse service management by bringing in the effect of omnichannel type to explore the relationship between RSQ and CL.

The post-purchase behavioral responses of omnichannel shoppers, who mainly rely on physical stores (acknowledged as a crucial channel in providing a seamless shopping experience and fulfilling the dynamic needs of the shoppers), are still understudied. The purpose of this paper is to examine how integrated store service quality (ISSQ) can contribute to a more optimal shopping experience (cognitive, affective and relational) and have a subsequent impact on shoppers’ psychological ownership toward the store, resulting in the generation of (face-to-face, online and social media) word of mouth (WOM).

The research is descriptive, quantitative and cross-sectional investigation. A purposive sampling technique was used for selecting the study respondents. The data were collected from 786 Indian omnichannel shoppers using a validated self-administered questionnaire. The proposed conceptual model was tested using partial least squares structural equation modeling.

The results indicate that all three dimensions of omnichannel customer experience (cognitive, affective and relational) positively mediate the relationship between ISSQ and psychological ownership, subsequently impacting all three WOM behaviors of omnichannel shoppers (face-to-face, online store and social media). The customer’s perceived value with the store and their perceived retailer relationship investment significantly moderated the relationship between ISSQ and different WOM behaviors (face-to-face, online store and social media). This research also demonstrated the direct impact of ISSQ on WOM and the indirect impact through different customer experience dimensions and psychological ownership.

The sample used in the study was not probabilistic and, therefore, presents limitations for the possibility of generalizing the results. The study was performed in a cross-sectional methodology in the Indian context; there is a need for longitudinal investigation.

This study addresses the need to investigate different dimensions of omnichannel customer experience that might influence various post-purchase behavioral responses. This study is the first to show that ISSQ might affect omnichannel shoppers' online, offline and social media word-of-mouth behaviors through different customer experience dimensions and the customer’s sense of belongingness to the store. The moderating effect of customer perceived value with the retailer and their perception of retailers’ investment in a relationship on proposed hypotheses was also tested to give managerial recommendations.

The financial services sector operates in a turbulent environment. The availability of financial services for customers has grown considerably, with providers encompassing retailers through to specialists. Food retailers in particular are the non‐financial sector key movers in the market change underway. Within this context, this paper aims to provide a framework to consider the operational, strategic and relational issues concerned with the entry of British food retailers into the financial services sector. It explores in particular the service provision relationships between large food retailers and financial institutions, suggesting that this is a case of co‐opetition, a concept which refers to the concomitant presence of competition and co‐operation in a relationship. Promoters and inhibitors leading to a co‐opetitive relationship involvement are examined.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a systemic methodology to assess the potential of and facilitate policies for the diffusion of a smartphone based service enabling supply chain (SC) operations in the e-grocery sector.

A System Dynamics (SD) model combining the Bass paradigm for innovation diffusion and an inventory management framework is developed. Semi-structured interviews are conducted to understand the industry business processes; a simple SD model is designed to capture the most important variables together with the relationships among them; a detailed SD model is calibrated and simulation outcomes are analysed.

The efficiency and reliability of the service drive its diffusion among producers and consumers, who in turn persuade retailers to adopt. The assessment methodology can be part of feasibility studies and marketing investigations in order to understand the impact of e-commerce tools on SC processes.

This contribution stresses the need to analyse how mobile information technologies may benefit all the business processes of the e-grocery SC, and not just one single process or stakeholder.

The approach offers a roadmap to identify the factors influencing the diffusion of mobile e-grocery services as well as the associated impacts on SC processes.

The work contributes to overcoming the lack of approaches studying the diffusion of e-grocery by taking into account all the relevant aspects and stakeholders involved and not only the consumer perspective.

This research aims to provide insight on the interactive effects of service quality and e-service quality on perceptions of retailer brand equity and also extend and test the efficacy of Baker ' s service environment typology in both offline and online service experiences.

A within-subjects, simulated shopping experience immerses consumers in both offline and online shopping environments and, subsequently, consumers are surveyed regarding both offline and online quality as well as aggregated evaluations of retailer brand equity.

Results demonstrate that consumer perceptions of offline and online service quality have a positive effect on retailer brand equity and service quality and e-service quality interact, such that e-service quality has a stronger effect on brand equity offline quality is low. The results also support the application of offline service environment frameworks for online retailing.

The results demonstrate the applicability of Baker ' s typology in both online and offline environments and reveal that customer perceptions of offline and online operations can interact to affect global attitudes toward the retailer.

The results suggest that retailers can improve quality perceptions by enhancing both their offline and online service environments and that these quality improvements can result in enhanced consumer perceptions of brand equity.

This study provides a first look at the applicability of offline frameworks for the service environment in an online context. Moreover, the results provide an initial assessment of how consumers update global attitudes toward a brand by consolidating perceptions across both offline and online interactions.