Summary: | 碩士 === 長榮大學 === 經營管理研究所 === 97 === If general merchandise stores want to have their places in this competitive environment and have sustainable operation, service quality must be the key. This means, satisfying customers’ demands, elevating the customer retention, and enhancing switching costs are the important factors for the current general merchandise stores to increase sales revenues. Also, in this study, trust is statistically the biggest factor to customer satisfaction of the corporations. Thereby, in addition to the service quality, it is equally important to enable the customer to create more trust on the stores, which then will elevate switching costs and generate customer retention. Though the products of general merchandise stores are not significantly different, the stores will attract more customers if they are characterized by their local features. When the buyer and the seller have more interaction as time develops, both parties will gradually create the sense of trust. When this trust increases, it will positively affect customer satisfaction and create more profits. In the previous studies in this regard, however, no one uses RSQS scales, conducted by Dadholkar, Thorpe, and Rentz (1996), to analyze the service quality. Therefore, this study adopts RSQS scales as standard to evaluate service quality of general merchandise stores in order to better understand service quality in the current retail stores. The empirical study shows that customer perceived service quality and trust positively affect customer satisfaction. The perceived service quality is positively related to switching costs and these switching costs will be positively related to the customer trust on the corporation, so customer trust is positively affected by the perceived service quality. This study, therefore, suggests that to elevate customer satisfaction, general merchandise stores need to start with their service quality and in the mean time, timely solve customer urgent problems, listen to their voices, and then re-examine their business operation and finally improve their overall service quality .
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