An Analysis of Factors Impact on Customer Satisfaction in Restaurants: Case of Fast Food Restaurants

Throughout the years there had been great changes in a country’s economy, its society, its cultural values and the daily life of human being. These changes have directly impacted the food industry as well which came into being as investment forms locally and internationally as well (Wang. L.2014) .There had been an immense increase in the number of these food businesses which is also known as restaurant business. This Restaurant business has been found to have results equal to tourism business, which tells us the significance of this business while talking about the hotel business, here restaurant business has a clear edge. Food, drink, accommodation and travel are four major parts of a person’s life. Due to these four reasons restaurant business had been a huge success in the recent years and providing these four factors has made restaurant business more attractive than ever. (Wang. L. 2014). The main purpose of this business is to provide maximum output to your customers by providing them the highest quality and the highest amount of satisfaction, which would eventually help the business to gain loyal customers and they would eventually come back to you whenever they require your products or services. (Jerry, 2014) (Schreiber 2000).

Due to the importance of customer satisfaction levels, it has become really important for business to know about customers not only when they avail the service or buy a product but even after they have taken and used all the amenities. This helps the business to understand the consumer behavior as well and businesses tend to come up with future generalizations and planning after knowing about the customer’s post purchase behavior. (Tam, 2000). Though there have been many internal economic changes within the countries there have still been a huge amount of restaurants like McDonalds still trying to enter the countries. (Wang, 2014). While there are still many restaurant chains like Burger king, pizza hut, Baskin robins , Hardees , Subway and Howdy still have a strong hold within the restaurant industry and have kept on increasing their share within the market. (Euromonitor International 2014).Where other roles keep on playing on consumer mind there are such factors as food quality and services that highly effect consumer satisfaction which leads to consumer retention. Consumer retention and consumer satisfaction are two terms that move together with a customer and businesses know that already. (Kim, Hertzman, & Hwanng, 2010).

So the companies keep on trying to give maximum elements to their customers that provide consumers with a good perception about the business. There have been different researches and different experiments conducted by different organizations to find out about service quality, food quality and consumer satisfaction. There had been researches on certain factors like the healthcare industry (Yeşilada & Direktör, 2010), the automobile repair services sector (Izogo & Ogba, 2015), the hotel industry (Dedeoğlu & Demirer, 2015), retail settings (Anselmsson & Johansson, 2014; Omar, Shaharudin, Jusoff, & Ali, 2011), tourism industry (Debata, Patnaik, Mahapatra, & Sree, 2015; Al-Tit & Nakhleh, 2014), the gaming industry (Wu, 2014), the telecoms and cellular sector (Ahmed et al., 2010; Ali, Rehman, Yilmaz, Nazir, & Ali, 2010; Omotayo & Joachim, 2008), public transport (Kumar, 2012), the banking sector (Malik, 2012) and hair care services (Jeon, Dant, & Gleiberman, 2014), as well as the food industry (Marinelli, Simeone, & Scarpato, 2015; Wang, 2015; Kafetzopoulos, Gotzamani, & Psomas, 2014; Bujisic, Hutchinson, & Parsa, 2014; Jang & Ha, 2014; Wettstein, Hanf, & Burggraf, 2011).

From these researches the clear ideas came out that how consumer retention and consumer satisfaction are closely bind to each other. But still there is a need for paying more attention to find out different factors that play an important role in the satisfying role of consumers and different organizations still have to cope up with many challenges in these fields. This research paper is structured into different parts from where we can find about different factors that play an important role in the part of providing better service quality better consumer products and therefore better consumer satisfaction level. Also there are different factors discussed which talk about the strengthening of service quality and product quality, where there are certain surveys conducted to find out the input in order to give output. The results will give us the perfect idea about the controlling of consumer retention at the end of the service process.One of the other two factors that go hand in hand with the food quality in a restaurant business are prices and the physical environment. A brands past, present and future performance totally depends on what a consumer thinks about their products and what had been their image in the past and were they able to satisfy consumer need and wants. (Oliver, 1999). It is said that if a consumer returns to your restaurant that means you were able to fully satisfy the customer (Dube et al. 1994).

Also it is said that consumer satisfaction is the major factor which decides that the best quality was served to the customer and they were satisfied with everything. Vavra (1997). Furthermore, Homburg and Stock (2004) described customer satisfaction as the degree to which a product or service fulfils or exceeds the expectations of customers. In marketing studies the most commonly studied topic is consumer satisfaction. All the studies related to marketing tell us about the satisfaction of consumers. There are two main aspects that we talk about when talking about consumer satisfaction. First How consumer assess about the product quality and the service quality. Second the perception about the person who provided them their services or the brands which provided them their services. As we know that in today’s market world there is a great competition between different brands and the way they provide their services.

While there is another aspect which provides a complete competition between businesses. This aspect is physical environment, which plays a significant role and brands try to get as much feedback as possible in order to stay awake in their market and stay in the competition with their product and services. As all of these factors lead to a major key point with consumer satisfaction, this eventually helps consumers to have brand success and increase performance. If we talk about food industry, people would like the best quality as well as the best taste for the food which would increase consumer satisfaction and people would start showing up again soon. This would make the brand a success. Food quality is a key factor because restaurants are dependent on this and customers purchasing that product again depends on the quality being provided (Namkung and Jang (2007)).Different things that play an important role when the food is being provided is the presentation of the food, how freshly made the food is and is the taste perfect.

Coming to another factor which is the physical environment that plays a major role in the consumer satisfaction and is the center of attention after many policies that have come under play by the government to provide full purity in your products and show perfect environment for your customers in the restaurants. The environment in which people eat had always been an important factor in determining how people feel about the product they are getting and how satisfied they are. (Ryu et al. (2012)). Whereas the physical environment plays an important role the price also helps the brand to shape up a constructive impact on the consumer’s mind. (Beristain & Zorrilla, 2011). Today restaurants are competing against one another on the basis of consumer satisfaction and the loyalty a brand can create with its consumer. For this purpose restaurants have started to become immensely involve in consumer lives. And the businesses try to come up with constructive policies in order to make consumers loyal towards their brand. There is still a lot to be done in the research for price sensitivity and quality of the food and researchers are still getting output of this field (Dapkevicius & Melnikas, 2009).

Therefore the researchers articles are being established to get the best possible and most accurate output. One of the most important sector has been restaurant sector in the recent years. Millions of people visit restaurants on daily basis for their own benefits. People visit restaurants for family gathering or their own personal meetings. It has been found in recent years that those who visit restaurants with their families or for family functions are the ones that usually are ready to spend most on the restaurants.

These are the factors that restaurants have to keep in mind while making up their strategies. What are the things that consumer think about or prefer when they want to visit a restaurant are very important to define. Price, quality, environment, exceptional employee service and security services are some important factors for restaurants to define for their own benefit because there are the factors that consumer evaluates in his mind before making up a decision. To throw some light on the variables that consumers perceive in a restaurant are very important to look on. Like a family celebration or an event where people from same family are gathered will be looking for the best quality, the best environment, the best employees that would help them and the best security for their safety. While we discuss what consumers will keep in mind there are also some factors that families who go for a gathering will probably ignore like high prices might be ignored because of the fact that families would want the best quality and environment which can be based on any amount. While in contrast to the ignorance of price there might be some consumers who will probably tend to ignore some other factors like security, employee services and quality while they will be price sensitive and price will matter a lot for them. While keeping these factors in mind consumer retention still plays an important role. A business would want to retain their past customers rather than new customers to build a positive image. To survive in todays competitive market you have to provide maximum satisfaction to your customers. The customers who are actually loyal to you and more active pay huge tips to the restaurants which builds a sense of trust. There is a huge relationship between consumer loyalty and making profit through it. (Reicheld and Sasser, 1990).

The extent to which a consumer is satisfied depends on the expectations of the consumer from the company or the brand. The performance of the product or service defines everything for the company. If the product is fully up to the mark and exceeds customer’s expectation then the customer will be fully satisfied with the product. If there is even a little flaw in the product or service that is being provided then the problems arrive in for the businesses and they lose customer retention and the trust of their employees as well. In today’s market where there is competition in almost every market segment the brands have to keep on coming up with different kinds of strategies which define how diverse and how important the consumers are for the brand. This way the brands or businesses are able to gain consumer trust and they like to engage with consumers in the coming years and time.

Different parts of research will be able to show us that how different factors which include food quality, price, service quality, physical environment, employee service quality and security all make up and increase consumer retention with the business. There had been many researches already on this but the results come in always different but in this research article you will be able to find out the best possible outcomes that restaurants have to keep in mind when making up strategies. With this it is also important to keep in mind that if a business ever doesn’t show up to the expectations of customers they might have to face a great downfall in their whole business.