Reflection on My Business Research Project

For the second assignment of our business research module we were asked to conduct a research on a topic of our choice in Marketing, Human Resource or general business management. Victoria focused that the primary research is the most essential part in our whole report therefore it was very important to choose a relevant topic.

Choosing a topic might sound easy, as there are plenty of issues one can pick. I realized that choosing a good topic that is not only interesting but also accessible to conduct a research is very important. As I had to choose an organization to link with my topic I instantly thought about Primark because I had already done a lot of research about the company previously on my other assignments. Also since I had to conduct a primary research I had a good connection to get an interview with the manager. Once I choose my company I though about the topic accordingly, my topic was about ethical issues at Primark. However, after getting reviewed by Victoria I realized that my topic was very restrictive to the given word limitation. Limited resources on primary and secondary data and it proved difficult to make any judgments on little evidence on such a wide topic. Therefore I eventually ended up changing my whole topic to customer experience management at Primark. This topic gave me a lot of flexibility to conduct my primary and secondary research.After getting it reviewed from Victoria the second time, she told me to remove few points from my research objectives and just focus on one area of the topic.Her feedback proved very useful for me as it made my research less complex.For example one of my objective was linked with the sales (how does customer experience management impact its sales).On the completion of my report i was actually very glad that i had removed this objective from my proposal as it would prove very hard to get the correct statistics and would have limited information as evidence.Therefore i just focused and examined on the key elements of Customer experience management at Primark.

I found a lot of information on customer experience management in journals, books and articles but on the course of my primary research I encountered some challenges along the way. Firstly the major challenge for me was to fix the date with the manager. Although he had agreed to conduct interview with me, he was very busy and had to often cancel or shift the interview, which affected my schedule that I had planned. Second challenge was to try and conduct a survey with Primark customers because they would simply refuse or ignore. The interview was eventually fixed and conducted but having to complete the questionnaire was a nightmare, it took us nearly a week to complete with the help of my friends of course.

I was nerve wrecked having to conduct interview for the first time. Surprisingly the manager was very jolly and showed a lot of enthusiasm when answering questions . Since the questions were only directed on CEM and did not require to give any confidential informations the manager gave me a lot of insights to Primarks work environment, products and their customers.It really helped me to write on my research findings.To be honest the staff did not prove to be as helpful as i thought because they did not seem to take me seriously and there response were limited like one sentence answers.Although some of them gave me pretty useful insights about there customers.

As i went about writing this report i found it very interesting because i had eventually understood the theories better and i had a clear idea to structure my report and how to link the theories to my findings.I believe that i covered most of the essential aspects of CEM in my interview questions and questionnaire which are directly linked with my findings.The only limitation on my research was to get hold of Primarks other store manager because i had no connections and they would simple refuse it or not respond to any of the emails.

Like i mentioned earlier in my blogs, the only thing i need to improve more is to work on my time management skills although i have improved immensely from the past. Next time i will make sure that first i will check all my assignment due dates, note them down and divide time for each module so that i will have plenty of time to do each assignment.Like i mentioned earlier allocating my time wisely, being well organised and planning will help me in my university and career in future.