The Impact Of digitalization on Customer Satisfaction in Grocery Stores : A survey of international students Experience with self-checkout at Prisma, K-Citymarket, and Lidl
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The grocery retail sector has seen a dramatic transformation over the last few decades with the digitalisation of the industry, and self-checkout has gained popularity in Finland. Adoption of self service technologies has become common in the grocery industry to gain cost and efficiency benefits. Meanwhile, the ranks of international students have increased markedly, creating a large customer base that is culturally and linguistically diverse, and visits large format grocery stores regularly. They interact with self-checkout systems, but are limited in their ability to communicate in Finnish, don't know how to do business in the local retail culture, and may not be as tech savvy as the rest of the population. The SERVQUAL service quality model was used to examine the relationship between service quality and customer satisfaction in the case of international students in self service stores (Prisma, K-Citymarket and Lidl) in Finland, measuring the difference between customer expectations and perceptions from five dimensions such as, tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance and empathy. A quantitative survey method was conducted and a structured questionnaire was used and distributed via international student network on social media platforms. The ratings of expectations and perceptions for each service quality statement were on 5 point Likert scales and analysed using SERVQUAL gap analysis, which calculated the difference between the two scores for each of the five dimensions. The results indicate that the self-checkout systems in Finnish supermarkets did not fall short of the expectations of the international students with respect to all five SERVQUAL dimensions. System reliability, staff responsiveness and perceived transaction security were the areas that had the best scores, and staff courtesy towards international customers scored the highest of the individual factors. Empathy especially for international customers was the lowest rated dimension, indicating a lack of understanding of the perspective of other people. Language options were rated above average, but most of the respondents indicated limited skills in Finnish, therefore language accessibility is an important issue. Retailers are thus encouraged to increase their multilingual interface options, offer language specific visual instructions and make better policies on inclusion clear to customers all of which will enhance satisfaction and long term customer loyalty.