Carrying Out an Investigation on the Customers’ Satisfaction Level and Individuals’ Performance Level of the Restaurants

Background of the research

Karen has invested in a restaurant based in a stall in the campus and sells traditional meals which are aesthetically rich in terms of culture, highly functional and cost competitive. She has seen a need for market research to discover ways to improve her business and increase competiveness. The traditional meals menu was chosen over other meals because of its uniqueness and for winning reputation a restaurant with a difference. There are also enough restaurants for other meals to students. The students and lecturers want to have healthy meals in a quick manner, good quality, good service, high hygienic standard and pocket friendly price. Karen will wish to improve on her services and make the restaurant bring a difference to the consumers.

The restaurant’s main objective is to provide a nutritious and healthy meal for its consumers. With the growing culture to reduce obesity, more people are looking for meals that ensure and cater for that. This research paper is intended to determine how this can be achieved. After the research the restaurant aims to offer a one stop meal where the consumers who are cutting weight, living healthy and who want to maintain their ideal weight will find the meals.

Research problem and objectives

The aim of this research is to find out:

1. the level of customer satisfaction level and areas of performance that need to be improved in terms of quality, service, hygiene, price, waiting time and menu
2. Differences in needs between students and staff, between local students and foreign students, between males and females.
3. Suitability of current menu to the customers and the need to add new foods

Research methods

This research is aimed at carrying out an investigation on the customers’ satisfaction level and individuals’ performance level of the restaurants. As well as the current suitability of the menus offered by the restaurants. There are two approaches that are available for this research which is qualitative and quantitative approaches. These approaches give positivist and anti positivist results. Positivist is used to evaluate quantitative results while anti positivist will be used in the literature review.

Intensive interview will be used as a primary tool to derive insights for this study. For exploratory and explanatory research, questionnaire approach is most suited. The research also required data gathering by a documentation method, which means reviewing, taking notes and studying other research, journals, notes, circular letters documents and personal interviews with this experts.

The qualitative methods of research usually give results that are well detailed and very rich in content that provides new concepts and ideas that will work to inform your program. The qualitative research methods will provide the researcher with information on how people and also on what people think about the safety of the crane operators but it will fail to provide the information on how many people feel and think in that particular way. If one researcher wants to carry out a research using the qualitative method, the following guidelines have to be used; the researcher will have to select a particular group of people who have similar characteristics in common and thereafter the researcher will have to convene a discussion by the use of either focus groups, interviews or observation of the behavior of an individual through such interviews such as the so called in-home interviews. The researcher should make sure that the discussion he will start will not have a specific structure so that all the participating people will be free to pick the discussion from any angle and that no specific response will be required for specific questions. He should also have in mind that an interview guide can be used to ensure that the right questions are directed to the right people during the progression of the interview (Creswell, 1998). These questions being talked about here should be asked according to the response of the participant and care should be taken not to ask the questions in predetermined manner or rather order.

The results from qualitative research should be presented as percentages; they should also not be subjected to an analysis of statistics or even be projected to wider population. This is merely because those people participating in this kind of research usually do not make a sample which has been randomly selected and the given samples are usually relatively small and not all the participants are normally asked the same questions. And no matter how much qualitative research one or rather a researcher will conduct, he will still not be sure of how exactly the participants feel or of they are experiencing similar things and at this point is where a researcher will have the preference of using a quantitative research.

Data collection

There are various data collection methods that can be adapted in carrying out this research. Quantitative and qualitative approaches will be employed. This is because data will be collected by the use of face to face interviews as a means of conducting interviews from customers. Face to face approach gives the researcher an opportunity to collect and extract detailed information from the sample. This being a canteen where students take their meals telephone interview will be of minimal use because it is easier to access students both local and international in the university. I will prepare a questionnaire that will guide my interview, with the students. I will focus all the all the students but segmented into different categories. They will be categorized into academic levels, religion, race, and country of origin. There are two types of methods of administering this question, distributing this questionnaire to those students who will not be prepared for this interview as well as interviewing those who are willing to be interviewed.

Questionnaires

The data that will be used in this report will be collected through questionnaires. Questionnaire involves asking various questions from the students, teachers and employees concern the question topic. This will be used to obtain important information about the food in the restaurant and how good they are. This research will employ two categories of questionnaires. The first category of questionnaires will be structured or close ended. Here I will offer a list of all possible alternatives from which respondent best describes the situation. They will be in form of multiple choices. A question will be asked and below it will be a list of all possible alternatives will be provided. The advantage of using questionnaires is that most people do not want to think hard, the answers are there and the respondent cannot be intimidated.

Unstructured or open ended types of questionnaires will also be employed to make this research a success. These types of questions will give the respondent freedom of response and permit an individual to respond in his or her own words. Through this type of questionnaires we will be able to get more information about the performance of the restaurant, different from or in more detailed way than what we have.

These questionnaires will be researcher administered. The researcher goes with the questionnaires himself and administers the questions by himself.

Interviews

The data to be used in this research will also be collected through interviews. An interview is an oral administration of questionnaire or interview schedule. It will involve a face to face encounter schedule. It will also involve a face to face encounter.

This interview schedules will be in two forms, structured and structured questions or semi structural questions. Responses during interviews could be recorded either by note-taking or tape recording.

Data analysis and findings

From the market research, various factors have been analyzed as factors determining the choice of place to eat by various students of the diverse culture. The factors that have been emulated in this research include the cleanliness of the food that the consumers consume. The other factor that has been considered in this case is the type of services offered by restaurant becomes important factor. The price of the food offered in this restaurant as well as quality which the customers consider when selecting food restaurant to take their meals.

From this research, the most important factor among the factors under consideration is the type of services that the restaurant offers. Out of the sampled students that were interviewed in this case, majority of them said that the type of service the restaurant offered is important and the hygiene of the food. The price of the food offered and the convenience of the restaurant both become other important factors important factors to consider. It means that students may choose food restaurant either on the grounds of quality or price depending on situation at hand at that time. Price is very important because without money in your pocket one will not choose a restaurant on any ground. When it comes to important factors price scores 44% while quality 41%. This is more less the same because the difference is more less the same in either side. However, these factors will interchange each other depending on the levels of income of the customer. If the customers level of income is higher then price will not be an important as compared to convince of the location.

Recommendations

The company should improve on cleanliness; increase the menu of the restaurant. The restaurants emphasis is to sell nutritious, low calorie food, for especially students who want a certain weight, so as to reduce obesity. The restaurant should take the advantage of adding another menu to its intended students of diverse culture.

The restaurant should also be offering service to our consumers who want to dinner. In addition to this, the packaging of food should be of high quality, maintaining clean standards for food. The restaurant should invest its staff in training them on how to present food for the consumers, so as to look appealing and creative to the eye. This will ensure the consumers always come back and frequent the restaurant.

The restaurant also should offer periodic price discounts in special occasions e.g. valentines, anniversary, Thanksgiving etc. There will be introduction of ‘Happy Night’ where all the food items in the menu prices are reduced to half. This will be done once every two weeks, to attract more students to frequent and eat at the restaurant.

Karen should concentrate in targeting all students. She should also change the menu to target people between all classes. She should also encourage many males to patronize their restaurants by changing the menu to cater for both categories.

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Appendices

Primary research can be helpful when you are conducting a study about a problem that has never before been addressed, or when there is little research available on the topic of your concern. It can be beneficial in writing about a specific person or group of people, or when you are writing on a new and original subject (Driscoll, 2006).

The questionnaire-cum-interview method was employed for conduction of this survey. A survey of the area was initially conducted prior to giving out questionnaires to people for filling in. the advantages of questionnaires and interviews is that they can be explained by the interviewers in case of any confusions. The response rate is good; however, questionnaires alone can give a lower response rate (“The Education Forum”, 2008).

A focus group was taken for the collection of information, as this is always a simpler and more effective way to obtain in-depth information from the masses (“Kauffman Foundation”, 2008). The number of people to be approached determines which method will be employed to carry out the collection of data.

The questionnaire for the research was built on a semi-structured approach. The questions were structured in a way that there was no bias whatsoever. Questionnaire was included:

• Age_________________________
• Sex____________________________
• What is your country of origin?________________________________________________
• What are traditional foods in your opinion? How would you define it?_____________________________________
• How often to you take them? Explain_____________________________________________________
• How often to you patronize our restaurant?
• How to do rate our service as compared to our competitors?
• Is our restaurant convenience to your meals? YES NO. If no explain _________________________________________
• How often do you traditional meals? Is it on a day, weekly, or fortnightly?
• Do you feel you have we offer hygienic food? YES NO. If no explain__________________________________________
• Are you content with our current menu? YES NO. If no explain__________________________________________
• Do you think our food is of high quality? YES NO. If no explain__________________________________________
• What do you think our menu is pocket -friendly? YES NO. If no explain__________________________________________
• Do you wish to us change menu by replacing it with new foods that are exotic? YES NO. Explain__________________________
• What is the main difference between traditional meals and exotic?
• Are traditional meals nutritious in opinion? YES NO.