A Qualitative Study on Customer Management and Response of Apparel Shop Masters

The purpose of this study was to categorize customers types in accordance with current shop masters' perception of difficult customers and to identify their responding techniques and know-hows in dealing with those customers in detail, a qualitative study is carried out by conducting thorough interviews with the shop masters. The interview contained questions on occupational hold-ups of shop masters, types of hard-to-handle customers, techniques in handling difficult customers, their know-hows in customer managements and what they perceived as the qualities of a shop master. T The results were as follows: 1) Customers who are perceived as difficult by shop masters are categorized into six types, making unreasonable demands, pointing out product defects, disregarding salespersons, making no purchase after testing products, having no personality and having no response. 2) Responding techniques for difficult customers were categorized into three types, 'active response', 'standby' and 'polite refusal'. 3)The result from the question on know-hows of shop masters in customer management can be divided into 4 groups, providing special treatment or information, building one-to-one relationship with the customer, suggesting garments in accordance with the customer's taste and providing friendly customer service. 4) For the question on perceived qualities as a shop master, individual quality, customer management capacity, work experience and occupational knowledge were answered.