Operational processes in businesses

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Business Research Methods

Introduction

In an increasingly competitive business world, businesses often find the need to optimize their operational processes in order to remain competitive and relevant.

The harsh economic climate further puts a strain on this delicate balancing act of operating a profitable business. Declining consumer-spending power means that businesses must find ways of cutting operating costs in order to remain competitive and profitable.

Business operation processes optimization and cost cutting initiatives imply that businesses need to research on their operations and business models. These researches are often required in order to develop new products, improve business processes or devise cost-cutting initiatives.

In their quest to chart new ways for their businesses, business executives will use different research methodologies such as qualitative, quantitative or mixed model research methodologies.

In their research, business executives may decide to conduct surveys in which they use questionnaires to get the required data. There are two types of question structures used in questionnaires.

The two types are open-ended questions and close- ended questions in which the former produce qualitative data and the latter quantitative data.

For the purposes of illustrating these concepts, a short questionnaire was constructed of which a copy is attached in the appendix of this report. A customer service practitioner in the banking industry constructed the questionnaire.

The aim of the questionnaire was to study the customer’s perception of customer service and the factors affecting customer service in the banking industry. The questionnaire consisted of part A with close-ended questions and part B with open-ended questions.

The population target consisted of various bank’s customers. In drawing a sample, which is a subset of the population, the customer service practitioner used convenience-sampling technique.

In deriving a working sample, the researcher repeatedly chose the nth most convenient customer as a member of the sample set. In this method of sampling, the researcher chose every successive fifth customer resulting in a sample size of sixty respondents. Thus the 5^th, 10^th, 15^th, 20^th, etc customers were selected as respondents.

Results and analysis of results

A response rate of eighty-three percent was recorded in which fifty out of the sixty distributed questionnaires were returned for analyzing.

A further ten questionnaires were spoilt on the basis that they were partially filled, or the respondents did not follow the stipulated instructions. Forty questionnaires representing a percentage of sixty-seven of the distributed questionnaires were analyzed.

Part A of the questionnaire consisted of the close-ended questions in which customers were guided on their choice of answers. The first question asked the respondents to state whether they thought the counters were always fully manned.

Out of the forty analyzed questionnaires, nineteen customers felt that the counters were fully manned while twenty-one customers did not agree.

This means that while forty-eight of the respondents felt the counters were adequately manned, a majority of fifty-two percent of the respondents felt the counters were inadequately manned.

Fully manned counters make a huge difference in the provision of excellent customer service in the banking industry. These results have a huge implication on the quality of customer service in the banking hall.

Customers need to be served quickly and efficiently. In order to serve the customers quickly and avoid long queues in the banking halls, then the counters must be manned at all times.

In this context, customer facing staff must leave their desks only on need-to-basis and even in such circumstances, they must ensure they have replacements or there are adequate CFS remaining to serve the remaining customer traffic at reasonable speed.

The researcher was also interested in finding the perception of quality of customer service using several indicators. The indicators used were the competence of the customer facing staff (CFS) in meeting customer’s banking needs and CFS’s friendliness to the customer.

The other indicator that used was the speed of service. In each of the three indicators, the respondents were to use a four-tier system to gauge the quality of customer service. The four tiers consisted of ‘excellent’, ‘good’, ‘average’ and ‘poor’. The results were as follows.

On customer’s perception on the competence of the customer facing staff, eighteen and fifteen respondents rated the competence of staff as ‘excellent’ and ‘good’ respectively.

This consisted of forty five percent and thirty eight percent respectively. Seven respondents or seventeen percent of the respondents viewed the competence of staff to be below acceptable level. Seven percent of this seventeen percent rated the competence of the staff as ‘poor’.

The respondent’s perception on the CFS’s friendliness improved marginally in comparison to their perception of the competence of staff.

Up to 90 percent of the respondents felt they were treated in a friendly way in the bank. Twenty-two respondents or fifty five percent of the respondents rated the friendliness indicator as ‘excellent’.

A further thirty five percent of the respondents rated this indicator as ‘good’. It is only a partly seven percent and three percent who rated the level of friendliness as ‘fairly good’ and ‘poor’ respectively.

The perception of the ‘speed of service’ indicator performed poorly in comparison to the other two indicators. A substantial percentage of thirty-five percent rated this indicator as being of average excellence.

Up to fifteen percent of the respondents rated the indicator as ‘poor’. Thirty five percent, thirty percent and twenty percent of the respondents rated the indicator as ‘excellent’, ‘good’ and ‘fairly good’ respectively.

Banking industry is a service industry where customers expect excellent service by friendly competent staff in an efficient manner. It is worth noting that the research study found that seven percent of the staff to be incompetent.

This is a substantial percentage that affects the quality of customer service in banking industry in a negative way. Incompetent customer facing staffs mean that they cannot execute their functionalities and work expectations in an optimal way.

This may lead to unnecessary long queues and dissatisfied customers. Banking service as any other service needs to be provided in a timely manner.

Customers are usually busy people who have a lot on their minds and have other issues to attend. It is shocking that up to fifteen percent felt that the speed of service in the banking hall to be wanting.

The researcher was interested in understanding the length of time that the customers waited to access baking service. Fifty five percent of the respondents indicated they waited for more than an hour to access service, with a further thirty seven percent indicated they waited for between forty-five minutes to an hour.

Three percent of the respondents waited for less than thirty minutes to access service. On the level of interference of the customer facing staff by the back office staff, forty-five percent of the respondents felt that it was only in very rare occasion that there was interference.

A further thirty seven percent of the respondents felt that only on rare occasion was there interference from back office. Seventy seven percent of the respondents felt the ratio of customers per CFS as large while sixteen percent described the ratio as medium.

The length of waiting time to access banking service can be tied to several other indicators in this study; competency, speed of service, manning of counters and the interference of the front office staff by the back office staff.

All these variables have a common denominator in that they result in customers having to wait longer to be served. Improving these variables to an optimal level would result in shorter queues as the customers get served quicker and ultimately more satisfied customers.

Part B of the questionnaire provided the respondents an opportunity to answer the questions in their own words. There are several factors cited as affecting the customer service in the banking industry.

Among the factors cited included ATM downtimes, inadequately manned counters, and poorly trained CFS who did not adequately solve the customer’s queries amongst others.

Some of the proposed solutions to issues affecting customer service quality included employment of more CFS and introduction of backup systems.

The respondents felt that technology played a critical role in the level of customer service quality. In instances where the bank system was not user friendly or the system kept on going down, then inevitably it led to long queues in the banking halls.

The respondents also felt that customers sometimes contributed to poor customer service in the banking hall through picking of cell phones while accessing banking services or failure to adhere to the laid down instructions. The respondents felt that the customer service in the banking industry generally compared to those in other service industries.

The reliability and validity of any study and its results is dependent on several factors. One of the factors that hugely affect the validity of the results is the method of drawing a sample.

In our case, convenience sampling was used. This can affect the quality of the results by failing to get a representative sample. For example, the sample was drawn by picking every fifth customer to act as a respondent, how was this representative in terms of distribution of corporate and retail customers?

To what level can we say that the chosen sample represented a typical bank customer? In this context, it becomes difficult to generalize the results of this study to the whole banking sector.

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Operational processes in businesses

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