DOC 723 Week 4 Patterns and Gaps Example

What the Literature Keeps Doing and What It Leaves Undone: Patterns and Gaps in Onboarding Research

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

DOC/723: Doctoral Seminar II

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The learner and the company are composites written for a model paper; cited works are real.

Week 3 organized about seventy appraised sources into four themes, each tied to a research question. Synthesis shows what the literature says about the study's three questions. This paper looks closely at how it says it: the patterns in its methods, settings and assumptions, and the gaps those patterns leave.

Pattern 1: Who Is Studied

Of the 31 empirical retention and churn studies in the matrix, 22 used consumer samples, mostly mobile phone, banking and streaming subscribers; 6 used business customers of large firms; and 3 included small businesses, none separately analyzed. Small firms appear often in technology adoption research but rarely in retention research.

Pattern 2: What Is Measured

Of the 14 continuance studies, 11 measured intention to continue rather than actual continued use or renewal. Intention is easier to collect but does not always become behavior, so these studies may overstate how well their models explain who stays.

Pattern 3: How Studies Are Designed

Most empirical studies are cross-sectional surveys. Only 4 of 45 set a group receiving some firm practice beside a group without it, and none of those concerned onboarding. The literature describes associations among perceptions more often than it tests what suppliers do.

Pattern 4: Where Customer Success Appears

Of 19 sources on customer success or onboarding, 9 were conceptual articles, 7 were practitioner reports and 3 were small empirical studies, all cross-sectional and one vendor-sponsored.

Pattern 5: Which Theory Is Used

Continuance theory explains why users keep using software from the user's perspective, through confirmed expectations, perceived usefulness and satisfaction (Bhattacherjee, 2001). Value co-creation frameworks describe what suppliers do. Few studies connect the two by testing whether a supplier action changes the user-side outcomes continuance theory predicts.

Counting the matrix turned a vague sense that "little research exists" into a sentence a committee can check.

Types of Gaps

Sandberg and Alvesson (2011) studied how management researchers construct research questions and found that most do so by gap-spotting, identifying neglected areas, applying ideas in new settings or resolving confusion among conflicting findings, which tends to produce incremental contributions. The patterns reveal one gap of each kind.

Neglect: small-business customers of subscription software are almost absent from retention research.

Application: continuance theory has rarely been applied to test supplier actions; its constructs are measured, not manipulated or compared.

Confusion: adoption studies disagree about whether firm size matters once owner characteristics are considered, which bears on RQ3.

Questioning an Assumption

Alvesson and Sandberg (2011) proposed problematization as an alternative to gap-spotting: identifying and challenging the assumptions that underlie a body of literature in order to generate more interesting research questions. One assumption runs through both the practitioner and the conceptual sources: onboarding works by teaching customers to use features, so usage drives retention. That assumption may be incomplete. For small-business owners, a named person who answers questions may build trust and a relationship that keeps them subscribed even if they use few features. The dissertation's RQ2 tests the usage pathway; the learner will add an exploratory analysis of whether onboarding is associated with retention among customers whose feature use stayed low, which would suggest a relational pathway the field has assumed away.

What the Patterns Mean Together

The five patterns reinforce one another. Because studies favor consumers, small businesses drop out. Because they measure intentions in surveys, they cannot show whether supplier actions change actual behavior. Because customer success sources are mainly conceptual or practitioner-based, the practice's effects remain untested. And because work on continued use and work on supplier action seldom connect, no framework predicts how onboarding should change retention. Each pattern alone would be a minor limitation; together they leave the dissertation's central question unanswered.

Patterns That Are Strengths

Not every pattern is a weakness. The telecommunications and banking studies of contractual churn use large administrative data sets and careful survival models, which the dissertation will borrow. The repeated testing of continuance theory across settings gives its core relationships unusual support. Naming strengths alongside gaps keeps the review fair and shows which tools the study inherits.

How the Gaps Map to the Questions

The neglect gap is addressed by studying small service businesses specifically. The application gap is addressed by RQ1 and RQ2, which set guided customers beside unguided ones on actual retention and feature use. The confusion gap is addressed by RQ3's test of size. The questioned assumption is addressed by the exploratory analysis of low-use customers.

Is the Gap Worth Filling?

Not every unstudied combination matters. This one does for three reasons. Small businesses are a large and fast-churning customer segment for subscription software. Firms spend heavily on customer success staff without evidence of effect. And the theory question, whether supplier actions change continuance, is central to linking two literatures.

Checking for Recent Work

Before stating the gap, the learner reran her searches for the past eighteen months and checked forward citations of the most relevant sources. Two new conceptual articles on customer success appeared; no new comparative studies did, so the gap still stands.

The Gap Statement

"Research on customer retention has focused on consumers and large business customers, measured intentions more often than behavior and rarely set customers given a supplier practice beside customers who went without. Customer success and onboarding sources are mainly conceptual or practitioner-based. As a result, it is not known whether proactive onboarding is associated with actual retention among small-business software customers, whether any association runs through feature use and whether it differs by firm size."

Why Not Only Gap-Spotting

The three gaps alone would justify a modest study that extends existing work to a new population. Questioning the usage assumption adds something more. If onboarding keeps low-use customers subscribed, then the field's focus on feature adoption as the route to retention misses part of what customer success does, and firms that judge onboarding only by usage metrics may undervalue it. The learner keeps this as an exploratory analysis because the records cannot measure trust or relationships directly, but the possibility shapes how the results will be interpreted.

Presenting the Patterns

In the literature review chapter, the patterns will appear in a short table showing counts by population, measure and design, followed by two paragraphs interpreting the table. A committee member can then check each claim against the evidence matrix in the appendix.

Limits of This Analysis

The counts reflect the learner's search and criteria; studies in other languages or databases may exist. Practitioner research inside companies is often unpublished, and some firms may already know the answer for their own customers.

Conclusion

Counting the matrix revealed five patterns, which leave neglect, application and confusion gaps, and questioning the field's assumption about how onboarding works adds a sharper angle. The evidenced gap statement leads directly to the research questions. Week 5 examines the theoretical and conceptual frameworks the study will use.

References

Alvesson, M., & Sandberg, J. (2011). Generating research questions through problematization. Academy of Management Review, 36(2), 247-271. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2009.0188

Bhattacherjee, A. (2001). Understanding information systems continuance: An expectation-confirmation model. MIS Quarterly, 25(3), 351-370. https://doi.org/10.2307/3250921

Sandberg, J., & Alvesson, M. (2011). Ways of constructing research questions: Gap-spotting or problematization? Organization, 18(1), 23-44. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508410372151