Create a seven- to eight-page paper (excluding the title and references pages),
a. Include a revised version of your introduction, research question, background research, hypothesis, research design, sampling plan, secondary data plan (if applicable), measurement scales (if applicable), observation plans (if applicable), survey plans (if applicable). These revisions should be based on the feedback from your instructor about these sections in Week Four.
b. Describe your plans for analyzing your data (e.g., content analysis, statistical analysis, etc.) and your plans for how you will present your results.
c. Include an APA-formatted references list.
Your paper should be formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Ashford Writing Center.
Introduction
Service quality improvement is important for a business to maintain customer loyalty, which comes with adequate satisfaction of the customers' unique needs. To improve the quality of services a company has to deal with issues of unfriendly workers, exorbitant prices of goods and services, poor handling of the customers and unattractive locations. Better quality services offer high returns in the form of good profits. Some companies go wrong by defining quality based on their specification and not on the customer expectations. This research attempts to link the profit made by a business organization to the quality of service it offers.Quality of service is the difference between customer competence and expectations compared with the dimensions used to determine quality. The parameters used to determine quality are courtesy, reliability, security, competence, tangibles, responsiveness, communication and understanding of the needs of the customers.
SERQUAL is one of the instruments used to measure service quality and it relates tangibles, responsiveness, empathy, reliability and assurance to come up with the measure of quality. This model is usually used to measure the customer satisfaction and preference. When the model is ranked high, the quality of service is high but when it is ranked low, the quality of service is below customer expectations. Tangible is the description of the physical ability of the service provider, empathy is the degree to which the needs are felt and articulated, assurance makes the customers trust the provider of the service, reliability is their ability to keep their word, responsiveness is the readiness to attend to the needs of the customers. Customer satisfaction gap is dealt with, when the company can score well on the five above mentioned attributes of good service delivery (Transportation Research Board, 1999).
Research question
Provision of poor quality services is a major source of sales revenues. Instead of affirming customer loyalty it discourages it and makes the business to lose some of its customers. At the same time it discourages some of the first time clients who are potential customers from maintaining business contact with the company. These would be customers after experiencing bad service which they appear not to like simply move to another provider the next time they require the same service. The customer will also not be able to refer another potential client; instead he or she will discourage the other by bad-mouthing. The aim here is to diagnose the indicators of customer dissatisfaction and coming up with the remedy.
Background research
Xerox had carried a satisfactory research between 1990 and 1990, which had its level of satisfaction at four. It had used a one to five scale with one being low and five being high. In this research, the company polled 480000 customers every year based on service quality, customer satisfaction and the product. Xerox had purposed to determine the customer rating of the company to know if they are meeting their expectations and if not, what were their failing points and what to do to improve on those weak areas. From its research, Xerox realized that the customers who gave them five in the rating were the most loyal customers and were more likely to buy their products six times over those who rated it at four. Furthermore, they noticed that both the two groups who gave them five and those who gave them four were satisfied but not in the same level of satisfaction, the level; of satisfaction had made one group more loyal than the other. Xerox managed to answer the question of how to quantify service quality based on profit, which they rated at six times
Hypothesis
Customer is the pleasure resulting from the customer's evaluation of service rendered. Customer retention leads to repeat business and bigger market share. It is easy to conceptualize customer satisfaction into referrals through word of mouth and repeat purchases. If the customer satisfaction is transaction specific, it refers to the customer's evaluation based on a specific transaction. If the satisfaction is cumulative, it refers to the customers' evaluation of all transactions to the present time.To evaluate the effectiveness of various service provision strategies with the view of coming up with the mechanism to fill this gap
The six hypotheses are: Reliably has an impact on customer satisfaction; Tangibility has an impact on customer satisfaction; Empathy has an impact on customer satisfaction; Responsiveness has an impact on customer satisfaction; Assurance has an impact on customer satisfaction; Customer satisfaction has an impact on profit.
Research design
Other than data collected with customer interaction and interviews, the firm will use online selling platform to integrate all the three components through login where customers subscribe to the data they need and then it is normalized and analyzed.Journals and books with case studies to give more emphasis on a full contextual analysis of events or conditions and their interrelations. Lastly the government source is incorporated to helpdetermine trends.Using SERVQUAL model, five service quality dimensions of (assurance, empathy, tangibility, responsiveness and reliability) will be examined for significant differences. The customer's perception of service in any particular service company will be analyzed with regards to their expectations using the different dimensions.
Each service quality dimension will be measured for their impact on customer perception of the service rendered by the service organization
.The research framework will therefore take the following form:
Reliability
Service quality Tangibility customer satisfaction profit
Empathy
Responsiveness
Assurance
Sampling plan
A qualitative approach of data gathering and analysis will be used, including an analysis of theoretical work and empirical findings that discuss the perspectives of service quality. Secondary data sources included management reports, end of year financial statements, magazines, reports and publications of various associations connected with service businesses and industry. The data collected here included customer feedback figures of the firm over the years to assess their performance; the number of players, to establish extent of competition in the segment; establishing any challenges faced by players in the segment and if there is any government support, by referring to any information in magazines, reports, publications, articles, books and organization's websites. Inevitably, to increase the precision of the data collected and for comparative purposes, field reports are used after interviewing relevant stakeholders. For any sampling errors to be minimized, a large sample size is utilized. The sampling population will be divided into units that are collectively exhaustive and mutually exclusive.
Secondary data plan
Both theoretical work and empirical findings will be obtained from secondary sources such as publications, articles and books and organization's websites. Journals and books with case studies give more emphasis on a full contextual analysis of fewer events or conditions and their interrelations.The planned choice of qualitative data collection method is by reviewing existing sources of information including organizational websites, brochures, reports and reviewing of documents.A common internal source of data for evaluating quality is customer feedback forms from past surveys. The data collected within the business whenever there is customer interaction helps in giving a picture of the trends. Externally, the brochures and annual reports of the competitors of a firm enable it to identify and analyze market trends and correlate it with competitive advantage.
Government documents are crucial sources of secondary data for any firm. For instance census findings, consumer information, laws provide accurate data.Technological advancements have made it possible for relevant information to be retrieved from the internet.It helps to integrate all the three components through login where customers subscribe to the data they need and then it is normalized and analyzed (Israel, 2009).In addition information contained in databases give emphasis on detail thus valuable insight for problem solving, evaluation and strategy. This detail is secured from multiple sources of information. It allows evidence to be verified and avoids missing data.
Measurement scale
The scale used to measure the data will have to be designed in a manner that captures the customers with their varying level of satisfaction. The scale will range from one to four with one being the dissatisfied and four being highly satisfied.1-dissatisfied, 2-weakly satisfied, 3-moderately satisfied, and 4-highly satisfied.
Questions
a) Are you satisfied with our services?
b) To what level are you satisfied?
c) If satisfied what are your reasons?
d) If dissatisfied what are your reasons?
e) How frequently do you use our products?
f) How do you rate our services?
g) What is your experience in your interaction withour staff?
h) Explain your response in (g) above
i) What do you think we could do to make you use our services more?
Reference
Transportation Research Board (1999) A Handbook for Measuring Customer Satisfaction and Service Quality
White. S. S and Schneider. B (2004) SERVICE QUALITY: Research Perspectives
SAGE Publications
Israel. D (2009) DATA ANALYSIS IN BUSINESS RESEARCH: A Step-by -Step Nonparametric Approach
SAGE Publications