The Effect of Workers’ Friendliness, Price, Service Quality, Brand Image and Location on Customers’ Decision in Choosing Laundry Service

Abstract

The improvement of life standards and needs of people in Indonesia, together with time limitation in taking care of daily needs, have resulted growing substantial demands of laundry service, especially demands for on kilos laundry service type that is more preferred for daily needs. Laundry service has become a growing business in 2014 and 2015. Aware with the growing numbers of laundry business in Surabaya, the researcher realizes that competitive advantage is required by her laundry business to survive a tight competition. The researcher decides to use Melia Laundry as a franchise for her business. Melia Laundry is a franchise of laundry which is based in Yogyakarta and already has good credibility for Indonesian people. Recently, the branches of Melia Laundry are more than 100 workshops and 500 outlets, located throughout Indonesia. Besides brand image, there are many factors considered by customers in choosing their trusted laundry service. This study is conducted as a follow up of a prior observation result done by the researcher, which is aimed at finding out the effect of workers’ friendliness, price, service quality, brand image, and location on customers’ decision in choosing laundry service. Those factors are tested in this study to find out whether they have significant effect on customers’ decision in choosing laundry service. There were 60 respondents as samples in this study, who were selected since they were regular customers from January to August 2015, or who used the laundry service for more than twice. Independent variables in this study are workers’ friendliness, price, service quality, brand image, and location, while dependent variable in this study is customers’ buying decision. All data in this study were collected through survey as method of data collection, and processed through multiple linear regression analysis using SPSS software. The SPSS results showed that there were significant effects of workers’ friendliness, price, service quality, brand image, and location on customers’ decision in choosing laundry service.