A Study
of Customers’ Quality Evaluations And Satisfaction
With Landline
Telephone Services of Saudi Telecom Company
Project Proposal for Submission to:
SAUDI TELECOM
To be executed by:
Dhahran, Saudi Arabia
Under
supervision of the Course Instructor:
Dr. Alhassan G. Abdul-Muhmin
Department of Management
and Marketing
As part of the requirements for completing the Marketing
Research course offered to MBA students at the College of Industrial
Management, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), students
are often required to conduct research on a marketing-related topic of
interest. In order to facilitate the learning process in the course, I often
prefer that the research address a real-life marketing situation faced by a
Saudi company. Upon recommendation from the Business Development Center of the
College of Industrial Management at KFUPM, I am considering having the
Marketing Research class conduct a study to examine customers’ satisfaction
with landline telephone services of the Saudi Telecom Company (STC). This brief
proposal outlines some of the preliminary issues that I deem relevant to the
conduct of such a project.
2. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES
The study will be designed to achieve the following
preliminary research objectives.
These objectives are only preliminary, and can be
modified with input from STC, and discussion with the students at the beginning
of the course next semester.
3. RESEARCH DESIGN
To achieve the above objectives, we plan to conduct a
survey in the Eastern Province using a structured self-administered
questionnaire. We have chosen the option of conducting a survey because this is
the type of research that can conveniently be conducted by the students within
the 12-week period that is available for the remainder of the course.
Prior to the main survey, exploratory research will be
conducted to identify the dimensions and factors that consumers consider
important in the evaluation of landline telephone services. This will be
achieved through focus group and depth interviews with selected customers and
resource personnel at STC. Results from this investigation will be used to
design the questionnaire that will then be pre-tested in a small-scale pilot
study before final implementation in the main survey.
4.
DATA COLLECTION
Students of the MBA Marketing Research course
at King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals will be responsible for the
data collection. Each student will be responsible for collecting information
from a sample of respondents large enough to enable him to write a separate
individual report on his findings in order to fulfill the course requirements.
At the end of the course, the course instructor will pool together the
responses obtained by all students in the course, analyze the pooled data, and
prepare a separate report of the findings for STC.
5.
DATA ANALYSIS
Each student will code and enter his data
into a computer for electronic processing using the SPSS (Statistical Package
for the Social Sciences) software. Specific analysis techniques to be employed
will be dictated by requirements of the research objectives formulated for the
study. The usual approach is for us to take the objectives one-by-one, discuss
the appropriate statistical analysis to be performed in class, and how to go
about implementing the analysis in SPSS.
6.
PRESENTATION OF RESULTS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
Findings from the study, conclusions drawn
and related recommendations will be communicated to STC in a written report. An
oral presentation could also be arranged if this would be of interest to the
company. This will provide the opportunity for management to seek clarification
of issues contained in the written report.
7.
EXECUTION TIME SCHEDULE
Table
1 shows a schedule of the time requirements for executing the research contained
in this proposal.
TABLE 1
EXECUTION TIMETABLE FOR PROPOSED STUDY
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February |
March |
April |
May |
June |
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Week #: |
2 |
3 |
4 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
1 |
2 |
3 |
2 |
3 |
RESEARCH
ACTIVITY |
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EXPLORATORY STUDY |
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1.
Focus groups |
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2.
Depth interviews |
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SURVEY |
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1.
Questionnaire design |
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2.
Data collection (by
students) |
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3.
Coding and data entry (by
students) |
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4.
Data analysis (by
students) |
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5.
Student report writing |
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6.
Pooled data analysis and
written company report |
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8. BENEFITS OF THE PROJECT
We envisage that STC will derive the
following benefits from this project.
1.
Feedback from the study
will help STC understand its customers and better prepare the company for the
ensuing competition that will result from the planned privatization of the
Telecom sector in the Kingdom
2.
Sponsorship for the project
will be seen as support for KFUPM’s academic programs by STC, and this will
portray the company as fulfilling a social responsibility. The company will be seen as contributing to the
professional development of the Kingdom’s managers.
3.
The project sponsorship
Improve the image of STC in the society
4.
MBA students are more aware
of the Saudi culture and environment and the historical development of STC than
most professional consulting firms in the Kingdom that tend to have a foreign
background.
5.
Furthermore, almost all our
MBA students are working in industry and taking the MBA on a part time basis.
These have experience with STC services both as consumers and as corporate
customers and their varied experiences will definitely be useful in the design
and execution of the project.
6.
The above two factors,
combined with the fact that the project will be supervised by an instructor
with the requisite skills and research experience means that the students would
be able to do a better (or at least comparable) job in the research than most
professional consulting firms operating in the Kingdom. Our experience in other
class sponsorship projects shows that this is not an overstatement. For the
amount of monies involved in the two options, sponsoring the class project will
definitely provide much better value.