DOC 723 Week 6 Positioning the Problem Example

Where This Study Sits: Positioning an Onboarding Problem Within Three Literatures

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

DOC/723: Doctoral Seminar II

Week 6 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

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

Weeks 3 to 5 synthesized the literature, identified gaps and built a framework for this study of guided onboarding and early cancellations. This paper places the study within the research conversations it joins and states what it adds to each of them.

Stream 1: Retention Management

Research on customer retention has shown that keeping customers is among the strongest drivers of their value to a firm, because each period retained adds revenue and spreads the cost of acquisition (Gupta et al., 2006). Reviews of retention management have argued that firms often aim interventions at customers predicted to leave rather than at those whose behavior an intervention would change and have urged research on which interventions help which customers (Ascarza et al., 2018). The stream has strong methods for modeling churn with administrative data, mostly from consumer telecommunications, banking and media.

What it leaves open: the effect of specific supplier interventions on business customers, and on small businesses in particular.

Stream 2: Customer Success and Value Co-creation

Service-dominant logic holds that value is realized in use and co-created by suppliers and customers (Vargo & Lusch, 2004). Customer success management applies that idea through proactive help after the sale, and scholars have noted that the practice has spread far faster than research on it (Hochstein et al., 2020).

What it leaves open: empirical tests of whether customer success practices change outcomes, using behavior rather than reported intentions.

Stream 3: Small-Firm Technology Use

Research on information systems in small businesses has found that adoption depends on characteristics of the business and its owner, including size and employees' knowledge of technology (Thong, 1999), and that small firms often depend on vendors and consultants for know-how.

What it leaves open: whether outside help affects continued use after adoption, as opposed to the adoption decision itself.

Where the Study Sits

The three streams meet at one point that none occupies: a supplier practice, onboarding, delivered to a small-firm population, judged by an actual retention outcome. The study sits there. Stream 1 supplies the outcome and methods, Stream 2 the practice and its rationale, Stream 3 the population and the reason the effect may vary.

Each stream holds one piece of the question; the study is where the three pieces fit together.

A Visual Map

A three-circle diagram shows the streams overlapping. The overlap of Streams 1 and 2 contains a few small surveys of software customers; the overlap of Streams 2 and 3 contains vendor reports on small-business onboarding; the overlap of Streams 1 and 3 is nearly empty; the center, where all three meet, is where the study is placed.

What the Study Contributes to Each Stream

To retention management: evidence on whether a specific, common intervention changes retention, and for which customers, answering the call to target by effect.

To customer success and co-creation: an empirical test of a supplier practice on actual behavior.

To small-firm technology research: evidence about continued use after adoption, and whether the smallest firms benefit most from outside help.

The Revised Problem Statement

"Retention research shows that keeping customers drives their value and that firms should target interventions by effect, yet it rarely studies small businesses or tests specific supplier practices. Customer success, a supplier practice grounded in the idea that value is co-created in use, has spread rapidly with little empirical evidence of its effects. Small-firm research suggests that small businesses depend on outside help with technology but has examined adoption rather than continued use. As a result, firms selling subscription software to small businesses do not know whether manager-led onboarding keeps customers, or which customers it helps most."

Why These Three Streams and Not Others

Other streams touch the problem. Relationship marketing studies trust and commitment between buyers and sellers; employee onboarding research studies how newcomers join organizations; pricing research studies how contract terms affect churn. The learner considered each. Relationship marketing informs the dashed relational path in the framework and will be mentioned there, but its studies concern long-term relationships between larger firms rather than early experience. Employee onboarding shares a word but not a phenomenon. Pricing affects churn but is not the practice under study and enters as a covariate. Keeping the positioning to three streams makes the argument clearer and the contribution easier to see.

How the Streams Talk to Each Other

The streams rarely cite one another. Retention studies seldom mention customer success; customer success writing seldom draws on churn models; small-firm technology research seldom follows customers past adoption. Part of the study's value is bringing them into one conversation, so that churn methods are used to test a co-creation practice in a population the adoption literature knows well. The literature review chapter will reflect that by ending each stream's section with a sentence pointing to the others.

Avoiding Overstatement

The study is not the first to connect customer experience with retention, nor the first to describe customer success. Its claim to novelty is narrower: a comparison of customers with and without a supplier practice, on actual retention, in a small-business population. Stating the contribution this precisely protects it from easy challenge.

How the Positioning Shapes the Review Chapter

The literature review chapter will follow this map. It opens with retention management, because the outcome anchors the study; moves to customer success and co-creation, because the practice is what is tested; then turns to small-firm technology use, because the population determines how the practice may work. A closing section returns to the center of the map, summarizing what each stream contributes and what the study adds. Readers who finish the chapter should be able to state the gap in their own words before the methods chapter begins.

Checking With the Committee

The learner shared the map and revised statement with her chair, who suggested adding a sentence acknowledging that some firms run internal experiments on onboarding that are never published. The statement now notes that published evidence is scarce, a more defensible claim than saying no evidence exists.

Why Now

Subscription software for small businesses has grown quickly, and so have customer success teams. Firms are making staffing decisions now, mostly on the basis of practitioner reports and vendor benchmarks. Hill Country Software itself must decide within the year whether to expand its team of customer success managers or invest in automated onboarding instead. Evidence that arrives after those decisions have hardened into budgets and job descriptions will matter less. Scholarship, too, is at a turning point: early conceptual work on customer success has called for empirical studies, and a careful study now can help set the questions and methods that follow.

Conclusion

Positioning the study at the intersection of retention management, customer success and small-firm technology research shows what it borrows from each and what it gives back. The revised problem statement now carries that positioning. Week 7 applies conceptual reasoning to the framework's logic.

References

Ascarza, E., Neslin, S. A., Netzer, O., Anderson, Z., Fader, P. S., Gupta, S., Hardie, B. G. S., Lemmens, A., Libai, B., Neal, D., Provost, F., & Schrift, R. (2018). In pursuit of enhanced customer retention management: Review, key issues, and future directions. Customer Needs and Solutions, 5(1-2), 65-81. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40547-017-0080-0

Gupta, S., Hanssens, D., Hardie, B., Kahn, W., Kumar, V., Lin, N., Ravishanker, N., & Sriram, S. (2006). Modeling customer lifetime value. Journal of Service Research, 9(2), 139-155. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094670506293810

Hochstein, B., Rangarajan, D., Mehta, N., & Kocher, D. (2020). An industry/academic perspective on customer success management. Journal of Service Research, 23(1), 3-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094670519896422

Thong, J. Y. L. (1999). An integrated model of information systems adoption in small businesses. Journal of Management Information Systems, 15(4), 187-214. https://doi.org/10.1080/07421222.1999.11518227

Vargo, S. L., & Lusch, R. F. (2004). Evolving to a new dominant logic for marketing. Journal of Marketing, 68(1), 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1509/jmkg.68.1.1.24036