The role of buying agencies in apparel retail industry and the evaluation of service quality

Retail industry works as the bridge between the end consumer and the producer and this sector holds the largest share in the world trade volume, in which apparel retail is the second biggest product group after the groceries. In apparel industry, Turkey is an important player that provides large variety of products of many global retailers. Usually retailers are sourcing from Turkey through buying offices because buying offices provide a significant contribution to the continuity of the relationship between apparel suppliers and their business customers which are global retailers. Buying offices give support services to their retailer customers at every step of the retail process, from creating the concept plans to customs and financial operations and it is obvious that when the service quality is increased customer satisfaction will also be increased leading to the continuity of the business. The purpose of this work is to determine the factors that affect the service quality and to evaluate the relations between these factors and the customer satisfaction in the B2B sector. Also, the factors that affect the service quality are analyzed together with buying processes and it is aimed to see whether these factors similar in different retailer types. In this context, a field study is conducted with the participants working in the buying offices as merchandisers. The relation between the service quality components and the customer satisfaction is analyzed with the application of the explanatory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Analyzes show that customer satisfaction is mostly related with the factors named as "intra-organizational communication", "trust in financial matters" and "the level of knowledge" that buying offices provide to the customers. By relating the retail processes with the service quality components and assessing these relations with the results of structural equation model comparatively, it is seen that the factors that determine the customer satisfaction are not the ones which are found to be related with most of the processes. Also, the comparative analysis of the type of the retailer and factors that affect the service quality reveals that some of the service components such as "the technological and financial flexibility" and "knowledge" show great variance between retailer types.