Improving Services Quality at Pet Shop and Care: A Case Study in Indonesia

Pet Colony is a pet shop and care in Indonesia that is selling various products and providing various services such as grooming, pet day care, playground, swimming pool, and hotel. Some complains from Pet Colony customers encourage Pet Colony to observe further the customer perception on their service quality, in order to improve their services. The aims of this study are to identify service attributes that need to be improved, to identify the causes, to provide recommendation for improvement, and to design a mechanism for measuring customer satisfaction at Pet Colony in the future. The services analyzed in this study are pet shop, grooming, and pet hotel. Using SERVQUAL analysis, the largest gaps between customer expectation and perception of each service are related to the following attributes: the availability of media for complaints and comments for pet shop, the availability of customer waiting chairs for grooming, and the guarantee of pet welfare for pet hotel, with the gap value of -1.99, -2.15, and -1.47, respectively. Furthermore, an Important Performance Analysis (IPA) shows that the improvement priorities for the pet shop are the media for complaints and comments, the operational hours, the no-discriminatory service, the clear information about the products, and the employee willingness to help customer. The improvement priorities for the grooming are the availability of customer waiting chairs, the ease in conveying criticism and suggestions, the queue numbers for customers, and the employees’ readiness and alertness to respond to customer requests. For pet hotel, the improvement priorities are the guarantee of pet welfare, the guarantee of pet health, the employees’ readiness and alertness to respond to customer requests, the employees’ ability to handle customer complaints, and the employees’ ability to handle pet outside the cage. In connection with the SERVQUAL and IPA results, the recommended actions for quality improvement in Pet Colony are providing training to employees, recruitment of pet shop salespersons, recruitment of grooming and pet hotel admins, input the database into a system, establishing a customer satisfaction assessment tool, building a mini canteen and waiting room, creating a grooming order system, creating patient track record card, and establishing pet hotel cleanliness checklists. Four of the recommended actions can be successfully implemented in short term.