Preparing to Conduct Business Research: Part 3
Our research focuses solely on the customer and their experiences within our company. To assess customers' behaviors, attitudes and opinions quantitative research will be the primary design of our research. By examining our customers' attitudes and opinions, we will be able to distinguish significant factors that contribute to an overall positive customer experience. However, to gain a complete understanding of the customers expectations we will need to implement open-ended questions that encourage the participants to expand further on their chosen answer. Through this combined approach, we will be able to capitalize on our strengths and improve on our weaknesses in the pursuit of becoming customer-oriented.
Primary Research Design When dealing with our proposed research of becoming a customer-oriented organization rather than a profit organization we chose a primary quantitative approach because of the capabilities of efficiently examining each our research questions. With a quantitative design we would be able to assess general attitudes concerning customer service, how appropriately our employees handled situations with customers and how our staff interacts with the customers. A quantitative design would be an efficient way to gain information about customer retention and whether a customer would refer us to their friends and family. We would not need an in-depth collection of data to determine whether a customer would return to our business or make a referral to our company. Determining a level of satisfaction as to whether or not our products and services contribute to the customer experience would be attained easily through closed questions. Our research questions will most adequately be answered by generating measurable data that can be tested to prove or disprove our hypotheses. Having measurable