Author(s): Oluwatoyin Adesanya, Chinonye Moses, Raymond Worlu
Quality standards compliance is a factor critical to customer satisfaction. It determines the entry and positioning of export enterprises in the global market. Quality standards compliance has been a difficult task for women entrepreneurs in the Nigerian non-oil export. They struggle with production, process, and packaging standards compliance due to profound knowledge regarding recommended social and environmental sustainable quality standards, and lack of modern infrastructure and technology. Quality standard non-compliance has reduced their visibilities and prices of Nigerian origin products and services, which significantly hinders their growth. This research revealed the empirical evidence on the assessment of how quality standards orientation of women entrepreneurs facilitates customers' satisfaction. The study adopted a quantitative approach and analysed using correlation, regression, and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). A sample of 416 women entrepreneurs in the agribusiness, textile, as well as the information and technology business processing outfit (ITBPO) were selected. The data mined via the structured questionnaire retrieved from the respondents exhibited the conclusions from the descriptive and hypothesis analysis. The findings revealed that the relationship between quality standard orientation and women entrepreneurs' perception of customer satisfaction is confirmed to be directly significant with a beta value of 0.685, which indicates a substantial degree of association. Although the R2 value in this study was moderately weak, the indicators of quality standards orientation variable collectively explained 47% of the variability of women entrepreneurs' perception of customers' satisfaction. Overall, the results established that quality standard orientation is a significant predictor of perceived customer satisfaction.