Capacity Management Practices and Customer Satisfaction Among the Shopping Malls in Nairobi, Kenya
Abstract
This study sought to determine the capacity management practices commonly used by
shopping malls in Nairobi, Kenya, and the relationship between capacity management
practices and customer satisfaction in the shopping malls. The study was conducted using
a Cross Sectional research design. It was based on 20 major shopping malls in Nairobi.
Collection of the first hand data from the field was conducted by the help of interview
guide and a semi structured questionnaire. To analyse the collected data, content model
of analysis was. The study ascertained that the widely used capacity management practice
to manage customer satisfaction in malls is the shifting capacity. Moreover, the practices
for achieving capacity management objectives had been fairly useful on customer
satisfaction, space management, process time and response time. The strategies used to
operationalize shopping malls capacity management requirements and customer
satisfaction were; scheduling activities, a flexible workforce and remodelling of
equipment. Shifting capacity majorly led to service flexibility and service time while
flexible workforce was useful in achieving response time and service time. Capacity
management strategies such as clear marking of walkways majorly led to customer
safety, variable shift responded to quick clearance, subcontracting led to reduced
complains and continuous service, whereas flexible workforce helped in meeting service
time. However, queuing strategy did not quite effective respond to customer needs, other
than enhancing continuous service. The study established that there were one main
challenge that shopping malls faced during capacity management implementation;
bottlenecks. The only action that shopping malls took to solve problems or challenges of
bottleneck in operation was the best capacity management strategy. The management of
the shopping malls should consider putting in place the recommended capacity
management practices (shifting, offloading and subcontracting) to even better its
customer satisfaction by enhancement of capacity management practices that have not
been fully embraced by some shopping malls such as offloading capacity. The findings
show that capacity management strategies are in use in these shopping malls, though it
was evident that some elements of capacity management strategies needs to be
strengthened to help fortify their effects on enhancing the customer satisfaction in the
malls.
Publisher
University of Nairobi
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesUsage Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/Collections
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