An Empirical Investigation of the Service Gaps of the Organic Agriculture Industry in Taiwan: Taking the PZB Model as Framework

• Main Authors: Chintya Dewi Trijayanti, 陳英君
• Other Authors: 羅明琇
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/k3d3zh

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 企業管理研究所 === 103 === Facing rapid changes of customer behavior and increasing customers demand on service quality, delivering high quality service is adapted as an important strategy in businesses. This study applies the PZB Model to investigate the service gaps in the organic industry in Taiwan from the perspective of both service providers and customers. In recent years organic chain stores have become an important distribution channels for organic products. Therefore, organic chain store companies and organic chain stores customers are selected to be respondents. Using case study method, this study collects and analyzes data by collecting literature review, gathering secondary data, and conducting interviews with organic chain store companies and customers. The findings can serve as reference to future improvement in the industry. This study finds that current companies still use passive approaches to understand customer demands. Since most of companies in this industry are small and medium enterprises, limited capabilities and resources often become barriers when fulfilling customer demands. Companies are lacking of service performance measurement and quality improvement program. All of these situations can cause the existence of service gaps. Other findings showed that in general organic customers already have an understanding of the organic concept. However, the industry still needs efforts to communicate with people who currently aren’t customers. Product information, product quality, and price become important considerations for customers in assessing service quality in this industry. Moreover, customer trust and confidence in organic products should be increased and became an important focus of the government as well as the management to stimulate industry growth.