DOC 723 Week 8 Literature Review Section Example

The Literature Review Section: Customer Onboarding, Continued Use and Small-Business Retention

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

DOC/723: Doctoral Seminar II

Week 8 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

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

What follows is a condensed version of the literature review section produced at the end of the seminar, with brief notes on the purpose of each part and on how the full chapter will expand it.

Introduction

This review examines what is known about why customers of subscription software stay or leave in their first year, how suppliers may influence that decision and why small businesses may respond differently from larger customers. It is organized in three themes, early experience and continued use, supplier encounters and customer success and small firms' reliance on outside help, followed by the framework that joins them and the gap the study addresses.

Method

Snyder (2019) distinguished systematic, semi-systematic and integrative approaches to literature review and noted that semi-systematic reviews suit topics studied across several research traditions. This review took that approach, searching business and information systems databases with documented strings, screening against criteria set in advance and appraising each source for quality and relevance. About seventy sources were included in the final review; their designs, settings and ratings appear in the evidence table in the appendix.

Early Experience and Continued Use

Customers' early experience with software appears to shape whether they keep using it. The expectation-confirmation model holds that users whose initial expectations are confirmed judge the system useful and are pleased with it, and that these judgments keep them using it (Bhattacherjee, 2001). Tests of the model across settings have generally supported these paths, although most rely on surveys of individual users and measure intention rather than actual renewal. Studies of contractual churn, using administrative data from telecommunications and financial services, add behavioral evidence that early-period patterns predict later cancellation. The evidence converges on early experience as important; it is weaker on whether the same holds for small businesses, whose decisions combine personal experience and business need.

Supplier Encounters and Customer Success

Suppliers may be able to shape that early experience. Service-dominant thinking treats value as realized in use and co-created by supplier and customer, implying that what suppliers do after the sale matters as much as the product itself. Customer success teams put this idea into practice by guiding new customers toward the outcomes they bought software to achieve. Yet the evidence for its effects is thin: most sources are conceptual or practitioner reports, and the few empirical studies are small, cross-sectional and measure satisfaction or intentions. Whether guided onboarding changes actual retention remains untested.

The review's argument turns on one sentence: the practice is everywhere, and the evidence for it is almost nowhere.

Small Firms and Outside Help

Small businesses may depend on supplier help more than larger customers do. Studies of how small firms take up information systems have found that adoption depends on business characteristics, including size and employees' technical knowledge, as well as on owners' attitudes, and qualitative studies describe owners who rely on vendors and consultants because no one on staff has time to learn new systems. This research concerns adoption rather than continued use, and studies disagree about whether size matters once owner knowledge is considered.

How Prior Research Has Measured Retention

The way studies measure retention shapes what they can claim. Consumer churn studies typically use billing records and model the time until cancellation, which captures actual behavior but rarely includes measures of experience. Continuance studies measure experience through surveys but usually stop at stated intention. Few studies combine the two. This divide matters for the present study, which uses billing and usage records: it can observe behavior directly but must infer experience from use, an inference the framework makes explicit.

Methods for Studying Supplier Practices

Because suppliers seldom randomize who receives help, research on their practices must deal with selection: customers who receive more attention may differ in ways that also predict staying. Retention studies in banking and telecommunications have addressed similar problems with matched comparisons and models of time to cancellation, and those methods transfer to software records. The scarcity of such designs in the customer success literature is part of why its claims remain untested.

Strength of the Evidence by Theme

Taken together, the evidence is uneven. The link between early experience and continued use rests on a well-tested theory but mostly on intention measures. The role of supplier encounters is conceptually strong but empirically thin. Small firms' reliance on outside help is supported for adoption but not yet for continued use. The study is designed to add evidence where each theme is weakest, using behavioral outcomes, a direct comparison of a supplier practice and a small-firm population.

Framework

Torraco (2005) described the integrative review's purpose as generating new frameworks and perspectives from existing literature. The three themes yield one: guided onboarding, as a supplier encounter, raises early feature use; use supports confirmation and perceived usefulness, which sustain continued subscription; and the effect should be stronger where firms lack internal capacity. A possible direct path through the relationship with a named manager, and a rival path through switching costs, are noted as alternatives the study can partly examine.

Gap and Research Questions

The literature leaves three connected gaps. Studies of retention seldom look at small firms or put a particular supplier practice to the test; customer success research has not examined effects on actual behavior; and small-firm research has not followed customers past adoption. The study therefore asks three things: does guided onboarding go with staying a full year, does it lift feature use in the first quarter and does its link to staying vary with firm size.

Practice Evidence in Context

Industry surveys report that most subscription software firms now employ customer success staff and that many credit onboarding with lower churn. These reports describe practice usefully but rely on self-selected respondents and seldom explain their methods; they show that firms believe in onboarding, not that it works. The review cites them only to describe how widespread the practice has become.

Transitions Between Themes

Each theme closes with a sentence that sets up the next. The first ends by asking whether the importance of early experience holds for small businesses; the second opens by asking whether suppliers can shape that experience; the second ends by noting that the evidence on supplier effects ignores customer size; and the third takes up exactly that question. These transitions carry the argument across sections so the framework arrives as a conclusion rather than a surprise.

Notes on the Section

The full chapter expands each theme with additional sources and a summary table. Every citation was checked against its reference entry, and evaluative comments on quality appear within each theme rather than in a separate critique section, so the weight of evidence is visible where claims are made.

Conclusion

The section shows how a semester's search, appraisal, synthesis, gap analysis and framework work combine into a review that argues toward the study. Each theme ends where the next begins, and the framework and gap follow from the evidence presented.

References

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

Snyder, H. (2019). Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines. Journal of Business Research, 104, 333-339. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2019.07.039

Torraco, R. J. (2005). Writing integrative literature reviews: Guidelines and examples. Human Resource Development Review, 4(3), 356-367. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534484305278283