Marketing Research Problem
Introduction
Public Investment Fund is a sovereign wealth fund that has been operating in Saudi Arabia since 1971 (Bloomberg Business). The main objective of the fund is to provide medium and long-term loans to the large-scale government and private industrial projects (Bloomberg Business). The range of industries in which the fund invests is varied, and includes telecom, green technologies, security, and information technology. Recently, Public Investment Fund has experienced problems with the outflow of customers. The fund has already received several complaints about the decreasing quality of their services. Customers believe that the fund’s employees are not committed to cooperation, and in some cases even make it clear that contracting is undesirable. Consequently, the fund faces with reduced revenues. The objective of this paper is to identify the roots of the problem and suggest strategies to address it.
Problem definition and research questions
The decreased sales due to the decreased quality of services make an important problem. Upon closer consideration, it is seen that the quality of services provided to clients is decreased because employees, for some reasons, are not committed to cooperation with clients. They miss important contracts, and it affects financial performance of the company. The company also faces with a high turnover, which further aggravates the problem. Taking into consideration the relationship between employee commitment and the quality of services that are delivered to the fund’s clients, this study aims at answering two research questions:
(1) What is the nature of factors impacting employees’ poor commitment? and (2) What are the major conditions under which employees deliver low quality of services to customers?
Theoretical background and hypothesis
There are many opinions about the nature of decreased commitment. According to Ongori, the sources of low quality of services that employees are found in job related factors. These factors, for instance, include job related stress, lack or commitment, or economic reasons. Companies seek to raise employee commitment, because the absence of it is very expensive (Ongori). It is associated not only with “an exodus of human capital investment” (Ongori 51), but also most importantly with a loss of clients. When approaching causes and effects this report aims at testing the following hypothesis: In Public Investment Fund, low quality of services is preconditioned by the lack of employees’ commitment. The latter can be addressed through reconsidering the existing HR policy on employees seeking long-term cooperation.
Information needed
To approach the research questions and test the hypothesis, a range of information is required. It is necessary to collect background data that would frame the study. The background information is collected through literature review, and provides insights into the causes and effects of employee commitment, as well as strategies to address the problem in organizational settings. The contextualized information is collected through surveying the current and former employees of the Public Investment Fund. Obtaining data from a sufficient number of people allows generalizing findings.
Another valuable information source is case study. It is “a problem to be studied, which will reveal an in-depth understanding of a …
