Question

Topic: Research/Metrics

Discrimination In Customer Service

Posted by Anonymous on 5/12/2009 at 8:12 AM ET 25 Points
I am doing a masters in Business Management on the above mentioned topic. I am having difficulty with the methodology to be used in tackling the question. Since discrimination is a broad topic I want to limit the discrimination to race and language. I want to exoplore

*whether it exists
*The degree of its existence
*How customers and businesses perceive its effects on business.
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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Jay Hamilton-Roth on 5/12/2009 at 8:50 AM Accepted
    Are you studying internal discrimination (by a company towards its employees) or external discrimination (by a customer service rep to the public)?

    Unless a third party has done the research, at best you'll get anecdotal information that will skew towards discrimination. That is, you won't be able to determine how much there is, just that some people were discriminated against.
  • Posted by koen.h.pauwels on 5/12/2009 at 2:46 PM Accepted
    I assume you are studying external discrimination...the best studies I have seen on discrimination use a field experiment: have people from different races and language backgrounds go to the company as a customer and observe how they get treated.

    This is how previous studies found that African Americans and women get worse price deals when shopping for a car...despite the fact that they were all in reality trained professionals who were wearing the same style of clothing and instructed to behave in the same way (to rule out other explanations). Good luck!
  • Posted by Tracey on 5/12/2009 at 5:24 PM Accepted
    Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but there is definitely some research done on external discrimination by banks. The term they use is disparate treatment, and there is fairly extensive quantitative analysis in this area using regression analysis. Look up articles about fair lending laws. You can probably find some info from the Brookings Institute and the NCRC. Best of luck.
  • Posted on 5/14/2009 at 4:57 AM Author
    Thanks for the comments. The area I am in has two malls. Now My plan is to interview the customers in the malls to find out their perception of discrimination in customer services, some examples of discrimination, to find out whether store managers are aware of discrimination in customer services and what they do to minimise it.

    Is it enough to explore wheter racial and language discrimination exist and how they affect business?

    I do not plan to focus on one particular comapny, the research aims to find out whether there is discrimination in the area and the effects of it.
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