Boost Mobile wants to get feedback from it’s customers about their satisfaction

Question

Boost Mobile wants to get feedback from it’s customers about their satisfaction with the service, coverage and overall value of their mobile phone offerings for residents of Boston. Altogether Boost mobile has about 100,000 customers in the city that it services from 20 different stores that are located in 20 major neighborhoods around the city. Boost Mobile has linked greater service in some of the larger neighborhoods with better signals from cell towers while other less populated parts of the city have had challenges with reception. Keeping in mind that reception issues may be linked to customer service answer the following questions:

(a) A very zealous student suggested that Boost Mobile take a random sample of stores and then ask all the customers who come into the store for a week to complete the survey. What are some advantages and disadvantages of this approach?

(b) Another student suggested that Boost Mobile sample every third customer in it’s largest stores which happen to be located in the larger neighborhoods. What do you think would happen to the ratings of customer satisfaction with this approach and why?

(c) Finally, the teacher’s pet in the class offered another idea – take a random sample of cell phone numbers from Boston and administer the survey over the phone asking respondents first whether or not they are a Boost Mobile Customer. What are the advantages and disadvantages of this approach?

(d) Suggest an approach of your own and describe why you think it is a reasonable one to answer Boost Mobile’s main question of customer satisfaction with service, coverage and value.

Explanation / Answer

a. Advantage: A random sample of stores and the customers who come into those random stores for a week is less time consuming, and cost of surveying those customers will be lesser and analyzing the sample data will be more easier.

Disadvantage: This type of sample will not be a good representative sample of the target population of all the boost mobile customers. All the customers will not be the existing customers who is already using the boost mobile services, There is a chance of more new customers than the existing customers who face the real time issues with the service, coverage, and the overall value of the boost mobile phones. And the most of the customers are nowadays not visiting the stores, but doing shopping through internet. So there is chance of missing out the voice of the customers who do online purchasing of the Boost mobile phones.

b) Advantage of a systematic sampling plan of every third customer is a good representative of the target population if we select the largest stores in the nearby places. Disadvantage is the selecting the nearest largest stores conveniently to complete the survey will not give a better estimates of the target population.

c) Advantage: It covers all the customers who is the real representatives of the target population. It includes not only the Boost mobile users, but also all the other mobile phones in the region. Disadvantage of this type, there is cost linked with the phone calls. the customers may not be interested to answer the calls. Some customer may complaint about the inconvenience and disturbances used to the survey calls. and there is no incentive for taking up such calls at the cost of the customers' precious time.

d) In the sampling method, every method has its own pros and cons. Making the trade off between the results and cost of getting the results is a process of strategic thinking about the current context of the survey. That means the survey's intention should serve a purpose, either it's result is used to resolve an existing issue, or it's intention to improve the existing proces and product. Here the boost mobile may be interested the revenue or sales through understanding the cusotmer needs more clearly. There are many loyal customers who find it a valuable service that addresses the needs of their requirements with less interruptions, with ease of use, etc.

So identification of the less populated areas which have reception issues, or the indentification of the statistified customers from the places where there is a better reception quality, requires a stratification or clustering, and the population of male and female customers will have different tastes.

So I recommend use a simple random sample of stores, a random time interval of the peak business hours, stratify the customers between the male and female, and take a survey of 30 each on a peak business month. I think that the mobile is meant for using while moving from one area to another, it does not make sense if the customers are facing reception issues in one area or better reception in another. The reception issues need to be fixed at any cost for achieving the granted satisfaction of the more customers.

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