Business research methods and applications

Business Tools

The information presented (Ch. 12) notes that the perception of respect is an important determinant of customer satisfaction. The company, Campbell-Ewald, used surveys to determine the importance of respect to customer loyalty, and further linked loyalty to purchasing. The company's surveys sought to operationalize respect using a number of questions. Its output is a set of five "people principles" that it believe are correlated with customer perception of respect. Customers want to feel appreciated, actions matter more than intentions, customers want companies to listen, it's about the customer and customers want companies to admit when they make mistakes.

The survey questions were responded to in a Likert scale from 1-5 ranging from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree." This provides information not only about the importance of respect but also the key issues that are the most important to customers. The questions that score the highest are the most important.

I feel that this approach is a strong one. It is important for businesses to be able to get a sense of the behaviors that most boost the perception of respect on the part of their clients. Many of these are fairly routinized, because most customer interactions are routinized. Thus, the company can use this data to change how it deals with customers, to ensure that customer service behaviors in particular are in line with the expectations that customers have for the highest level of respect.

Ultimately, respect is an interesting concept. Part of it is just "you know it when you feel it," but for a company it still needs to be operationalized in order that the people in the company deliver it on a consistent basis. So this study is interesting, in that it allows managers away from the front lines to properly understand what respect actually looks like from the perspective of the customer.

The research questions (Ch.5) are intended to lead to a specific outcome, that being higher service quality. The stated objectives of the research are to gauge how customer tolerance levels for repair performance affect overall satisfaction and to identify which process components should be improved to elevate the overall satisfaction of customers. There are two problems. With the first question, the company has no way of knowing the tolerance level of any one customer. Thus, it does not matter how this level affects customer perceptions -- assume the customer has a low tolerance for repair performance because quite frankly, you have no idea what this level is in any given customer.

The second problem with the objectives is that the second objective only represents half of what is needed. Yes, it is important to know what areas need work, but this doesn't provide any insight into what work might be needed. The survey does not ask what the customers actually want from the company in terms of service quality. Also, if they are using a 5-point scale, how is that qualitative and open-ended? The research design is quite sloppy. The methodology is a little strange -- is it a Likert scale? A qualitative response? Can you regress qualitative responses? There is a lot of clarity about the font they will be using, but none of the research methods. Even the budget doesn't make sense. They have a line item for travel costs -- where does travel come into this? - but they don't have a line item for the cost of the telephone survey? Those aren't free.