The impact of service delivery on customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry

Topic: “The impact of service delivery on customer satisfaction in the hospitality industry”
Introduction
The proposal and dissertation will start off with a clear description of the problem that is to be studied, and why it is of interest or importance. In essence the introduction provides a rationale for your inquiry: it is an argument about why your particular topic is important to practice or to theory.
Instructions
Write your introduction in the space below
 
Bulleted Objectives
You should state the broad aim of the dissertation objectives of your study in short bulleted statements. For example,
”…the aim of the study will be to:
• Investigate the principles by which XYZ organisation undertake their ABC activity;
• Develop new methods (DEF) to achieve the improved performance in of ABC in XYZ;
• Assess the opportunity of adopting DEF for use in GHI contexts”.
or
“…the aim of this study will be to:
• Explore and critically appraise the nature of JKL methods/principles/techniques;
• Assess the degree to which JKL methods/principles/techniques are in current use in MNO sector;
• Develop a new venture plan for a consultancy service to assist new organisations to adopt or improve their use of JKL methods in practice.

The above provide general types of statements about objectives. Please be creative in constructing your own objectives. The first is a typical action research project type set of objectives. The second is a bit more ‘pure’, and represents a typical research dissertation type set of objectives (with a very practical last bullet objective).
Instructions
Write your bulleted objectives in the space below

 
Literature Review
All dissertations must be placed in an academic context. Your dissertation will have a substantial literature review in which you outline current thinking about the subject area of the dissertation. It is helpful to think about why a literature review is so important in an academic dissertation. Bear in mind that we all stand on the shoulders of giants! Our ideas build upon existing ideas and we need to acknowledge research studies that have gone before.
A literature review enables you to:
• locate your work within the context of others;
• sensitise you to the key dimensions of the phenomena that we are inquiring into.

The literature review should not be just a list of what various authors have written about the subject. It must identify the common themes that appear, identify differences of viewpoint of the writers, and note areas where authors suggest that further work is necessary. It should attempt to outline the authors’ methods in coming to their conclusions, and attempt to critique their work (i.e. not just describe it). Don’t be frightened to criticise the literature… behind each article is a human being, and all humans have limitations! But please make sure you justify your argument! BE CRITICAL!
The literature review should be largely based on academic journal articles, because these are normally considered to be the most reliable. You are expected to have personally consulted a reasonable number of journal articles yourself. Relying on extensive secondary referencing is not acceptable. There may be projects where you believe that the direct literature is very limited, and it is perfectly acceptable to say so in a dissertation.
In Research Dissertations, it is quite normal to develop some tentative research questions/hypotheses relevant to your study from your literature review. In Action Research Projects your client deliverable(s) will provide focus for your literature review.
Outline literature review
Write a summary literature review in the space below
 
Literature review (continued) 
Your Literature review and your outline empirical work

List 5 questions that you need to know about, that arise from the above literature review.  
Methodology
The methodology will outline and justify the methods that are to be utilised in your project. Methodology is the argument about the methods. This section in your dissertation will provide a rationale for the choices made. For example you may choose an action research study, using Systems Theory to underpin it. Or you may have chosen to use survey research or interviews. Alternatively, you may have chosen to use ethnography or participant observation. You may have chosen to use an inductive approach (e.g. a form of ‘grounded’ theory construction). Or you might have chosen quantitative method (normally considered ‘deductive’ in which a test is carried out). Sometimes a particular combination of these might integrate together, to structure your inquiry. The choices that you make must be valid for the subject of your dissertation and topic of inquiry.
Given that you want the University to confer on you a ‘Masters’ status, this section in your dissertation is your opportunity to demonstrate your understanding of what constitutes a valid scientific approach for your particular chosen topic. It is again an argument about your chosen method (i.e. ‘methodology’). All research project types, require consideration of methodology because the method distinguishes a scientific piece from other forms of knowledge (e.g. based on ‘guesswork’!).
There must also be a fairly detailed specification of how you will undertake a research project. For instance, if you are going to undertake a survey of some kind, you should specify as far as possible the sampling frame, the broad questions to be addressed in the survey instrument, how you will administer it, the sample size, what you will do about non-response, and how you will analyse the data. If you are going to undertake a project based in an organisation, you may, for instance, also specify the people you will have discussions with, about what, approach taken (e.g. semi-structured interviews etc), the documents that you will need access to, the way you are going to get access and your approach in terms of your interactional sequences.
Summary and justification of your proposed method
Write your summary of you proposed methodology in the space below. What kind of study is it? Why have you chosen this method/kind of study? Identify where you propose to use ethnography, participant observation, non-participant observation, Covert techniques, overt techniques, questionnaires, qualitative interviews etc.
 
Methodology (continued) 
Five Questions
Create 5 questions that you are going to ask to one or more respondents of a questionnaire.

Data types
What type of data are you capturing in your questions above? Note that the data type is dependent on the question and the data expected in the result, and as such it is question-specific. Is that the correct data type?
Put your analysis in the box below. Make sure you justify your thinking!
 
Descriptive, Explanatory & Predictive Statistics
Explain and justify how you intend to analyse the data that you are going to collect for your research.

Optimise you data collection method to allow yourself to apply regression. Explain how that would be done, and apply a simple regression to some dummy data.
Insert a screenshot below…
 
Software tools for data capture
Using a software tool, create an on-line questionnaire from the 5 questions above (e.g. using google forms, survey monkey or equivalent). Get your colleagues to fill it in! Did they understand it? Insert a URL to it, or a screen shot of it below.

 
Sampling
• Who is your target sample? Justify your sampling method… how representative is the proposed sample? How are you going to reach your sample?
• Probability (Random) Samples
• Simple random sample
• Systematic random sample
• Stratified random sample
• Multistage sample
• Multiphase sample
• Cluster sample
• Non-Probability Samples
• Convenience sample
• Purposive sample
• Quota

 
Technology of Quantitative Analysis
What kind of quantitative analysis are you intending to use? Take the data that you have generated so far and, (i) justify how you are going to analyse it, (ii) apply a software quantitative analytics tool, e.g. SPSS, Excel, Tableau, SAS, R.
Put your justifications and screenshots in the space below.
 
Qualitative data designs
Design a very short interview questionnaire (just a few questions will do). Try it out on a colleague and record the result using a voice recorder. Your interview questionnaire should be put in the box below.

 
Laddering/ZMET
Outline how Laddering or ZMET might help to refine your data? Design a sophisticated interview based on Laddering or ZMET.
Outline your designs below.
 
Analysis of Qualitative Data
How do you propose to analyse qualitative data? Outline and justify your approach below.

 
Qualitative software tools
APPLY one qualitative analysis software tool that you can apply to your qualitative data. Are you going to use NVIVO or some other text analysis tool (see Appendix 1 of this document)? Which other software are you going to use?
Identify your proposed software, and put screenshots of your tests in the box below. 
Time-Plan
What will be the time plan of the project? You should include a detailed plan. A dissertation is not a complex project, but you should give some indication of key activities and tasks that are to be undertaken, with estimate timings. Sometimes there are too many unknowns, so please construct a time-plan with what you know and expect. Why not have a look at software tools that might help you with it.
Instructions
Write your time plan in the space below. Put in some screenshots of the software you are going to use.
 
Other Issues to consider
• Are there ethics considerations, or ethics procedures that are required?
• Will you have sufficient access to people or documents? If you are going to undertake an action research project, you should show that the client organisation has agreed to this.
• Will there be any political issues involved in the organisation(s) that might impede the work?
• If an internet survey is to be undertaken, what sort of response can be expected, and what are the problems of bias?
• What risks can you foresee, and what will you do if they materialise?
• What are the limitations of the work?
• …etc
Further guidance on the preparation of the proposal will, of course, come through lectures, tutorials, supervision and from your own reading.

Write and analyse the ‘other considerations’ that you have been thinking about.

 
Bibliography
Put a short bibliography below. Make sure you know and apply the correct standards for writing a bibliography, e.g. Harvard, APA, MLA etc. Use your favourite on-line bibliography tool e.g. zotero, Mendeley, bibme, CitationMachine, citefast, Docear, Recipes4Success, Ottobib.
 
Develop your poster
Instructions
Outline your project proposal as a poster (for an example, see Appendix 2). Insert it below, and upload it to the relevant area on Moodle.
 
Appendix 1: A selection of text Analysis tools (for qualitative analysis)
https://gate.ac.uk
https://cat.texifter.com
http://khcoder.net
Google Cloud Natural Language API
https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/qda-miner-lite/
https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/visualtext/
https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/tams/
https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/pattern/
http://www.nltk.org/

Convert mp3 to text
https://www.ofoct.com/audio-converter/audio-to-text.html
https://www.360converter.com/conversion/video2TextConversion
https://vocalmatic.com/auto-transcribe/mp3-to-text
https://cloud.google.com/speech-to-text/
https://www.inqscribe.com/
HyperTranscribe
 
Appendix 2: An example of a research poster