Tech Bookstore and Quality Problems

Tech Bookstore and Quality Problems

MNGT 545 - Operations Management

Adrian Heredia

Tech Bookstores’ experience provides an opportunity to evaluate the importance and impact of quality on a particular businesses overall functionality and success. This paper will address this important issue by evaluating the reasons why Mr. Watson opted to organize the customer survey the way he did. Following this discussion, this paper will consider other options available to Mr. Watson to analyze the stores’ quality problems. The paper will then attempt to determine how quality is defined at Tech Bookstores and illustrate the bookstores’ incurred costs of poor quality. The paper will continue with an evaluation of the potential obstacles that might serve to hinder change and quality improvement at the bookstores. Finally, the paper will conclude with recommendations to improve conditions at Tech Bookstores’ off-campus location.

Mr. Watson elected to organize the customer survey the way he did given the practicality of the techniques he utilized as well as the descriptive nature of information he expected to obtain through the surveying process. According to Zikmund, Babin, Carr and Griffin (2010), descriptive research “describes characteristics of objects, people, groups, organizations, or environments… of a given situation” (p. 55). Based on the aforementioned definition, the survey technique employed by Mr. Watson enables him to identify important insights that describe tendencies about employees at the off-campus bookstore in an efficient and inexpensive manner. Furthermore, the questions within Mr. Watson’s customer survey are clear, concise and easy to understand making the survey accessible to a wide range of customer demographics (i.e. age, gender, educational background and socio-economic status). Ultimately, Mr. Watson’s survey technique incurred low costs, was easy to execute and enabled his team to gather data from a large and diverse population size. While practically effective, the survey itself did contain several limitations.

In order to improve the survey and develop more sophisticated insights, Mr. Watson could have developed questions that were less leading in nature. Leading questions often serve to control or constrain a response and suggest a particular answer (Kebbel, Deprez & Wagstaff, 2003, p. 50). For example, the questions “Were employees courteous and friendly?” and “Did you have to wait long for service?” imply that the bookstore might suffer from a lack of customer care or that customers in the past have waited extended periods to be served. A potential solution to this limitation could be to ask questions that are more open ended and based on a likert scale (Kebbel, Deprez & Wagstaff. (2003), p. 50). Such questions would enable respondents to provide profounder insights and position Mr. Watson to generate more accurate assumptions about the behavior of his employees at the off-campus bookstore. Therefore, by merely changing the wording and structure of the survey, Mr. Watson could have significantly improved the richness and validity of the conclusions drawn from the survey.

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