Impact of Service Convenience in the Beauty Care Service Industry: A Study on the High End Parlors

Abstract

Women and beauty have always been correlated. Resembling the thought, the beauty care service sector is one of the booming industries of Bangladesh. Keeping that on mind, this research aims to explore the influence of service convenience on consumer satisfaction and loyalty, identify if consumer characteristics play significant role in shaping consumer satisfaction driven by service convenience and explore the role of consumer satisfaction in determining the influence of service convenience on service loyalty. In this research, both primary and secondary data has been used. Primary data has been collected through face-to-face interview, In-depth Interview and Focus group Discussion. Secondary data has been collected from relevant articles, books, journals and websites. A total 384 samples were taken for questionnaire survey. The respondents have been picked from 64 parlors in 26 different location of Dhaka City using mall interception techniques. Advance statistical tools are used to test the hypothesis. The demographic characteristics of the respondents show that most of the clients of the beauty parlors are young and they belong to the 18-34 age groups. As per educational level, most of them are graduates, while profession wise, students and service holders dominated most. Some of these clients visit several parlors to try different services. Word-of-mouth and social media are the main means of communication for them. The findings show that the dimensions representing the service convenience construct and the service loyalty are significant on their own for beauty care sector. Results shows, four out of five service convenience measures have significant effect on customer satisfaction. Decision, benefit and post-benefit conveniences have the strongest effect on the satisfaction construct. Among these, benefit convenience is found to have strong relationship with customer satisfaction. Transaction convenience has no effect on customer satisfaction. The study found that consumer satisfaction mediates the relationship between service convenience and service loyalty, in beauty care sector of Bangladesh. It is evident that consumer characteristics like age and profession moderates the relationship between SERVCON and customer satisfaction while education, has no moderating effect on that relationship.vi Two case studies, included in this thesis, reflect the real life scenario of the parlor business, its challenges and prospects. Several future research propositions was suggested based on the results of this current study that would provide further opportunity to extend studies on service convenience and its consequences.