Business Research Project Part 2: Research Plan

Business Research Project Part 2: Research Plan

Business Research Project Part 2: Research Plan

Identification of an Organization and a Dilemma under Research

Team B collectively decided to identify an organization that was faced with a dilemma. Retailer, Target experienced a security breach involving stolen credit card information, names, mailing addresses, phone numbers and/or email addresses during the holiday season of 2013 (Target, 2013) .

Customers were not immediately aware because Target had to perform an investigation. The collected data of the investigation was to identify those affected and to what degree. According to the Washington Post (2014), several questions were asked and answered in order for the organization to successfully address the issues.

Purpose Statement

The purpose of this research project is to establish whether the recent security/credit breach at Target has affected the loyalty of its customers. Direct customers are the people, individuals, or institutions that have a higher chance of buying the products floated by an organization (Stieb, 2006). The organization strives to ensure that the customers are completely satisfied in order for them to recommend the organization and its products or services to new prospective consumers. This includes the provision of maximum security to ensure that their personal non-public information is safe and secured from any form of malicious data tampering.

Organizations should therefore ensure consumer information is protected at all levels. It is troubling to learn for the business that customers’ non-public security and credit cards information were tampered as this could translate into the customers’ loyalty weakening. This scenario also threatens the name and integrity (Reichheld & Sasser, 1990) of the organization by keeping away the prospective customers from the organization for the fear of being affected with the similar breach in the future.

The organization should as a result act quickly to redeem itself and the customers from any form of loss from the breach. This also means the investing in a more robust and effective security platform must be done to safeguard their customers (Stieb, 2006). First, the numerical values of the affected need to be noted to determine the extent to which the security breach has caused damage.

Also the way the consumers are affected needs to be brought in consideration which would help to cope with such situations in the future. Second, it is extremely important to know the views of the consumers and their response to the company’s products in the future. The rights of customers need to be given the highest priority and it is worth noting that the customer’s confidence is not lost. Hence this research is vital in revealing these basic yet very important factors that can influence business transactions.

Research Questions

To address the problem of the security breach, there are a variety of paths Target can take to deal with the issue; one is conducting research to identify the security weakness within the system. The Jaquith (2007) website suggests the following questions may be included in the initial research:

1. How many sites are connected directly to the core network without intermediate firewalls?

2. How many of these sites have deployed unsecured wireless networks?

3. Starting with zero knowledge, how many minutes are required to gain full access to network domain controllers?

4. What percentage of user accounts could be compromised in 15 minutes or less?

5. What is the relative “risk score” of each application compared to the others?

Customer satisfaction is a key performance indicator within the business which measures how products and services provided to consumers by companies meet or exceed customers’ expectations. Target is a retail megastore that must compete for customers; therefore customer satisfaction is a key element of the business strategy. The security breach has left many consumers to wonder if they should continue to be loyal to Target and to gage into what consumers are thinking the following questions can be proposed:

1. Are consumers satisfied how Target dealt with the security breach?

2. What factors affect consumers’ satisfaction in this situation?

3. Who are the satisfied consumers in terms of age, gender, length of time as a Target consumer, and the frequency of using the store credit card or other credit cards either shopping at a store or on-line?

Conclusion

It is the hope at the conclusion of this research project that information can be gained in ways to best protect consumer’s personal information and gage into how consumers feel towards an organization that may have potentially put them at risk. Should consumers stay loyal to the organization or relieve themselves from any further interactions with them?

References

Jaquith, A. (2007). Sample Questions for Finding Information Security Weaknesses, CSO Online. Retrieved from http://www.csoonline.com/article/2121824/metrics-budgets/sample-questions-for-finding-information-security-weaknesses.html

Jayakumar, A., Tsukayama, H.(2014). Target Breach: What You Need to Know. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/target-breach-what-you-need-to-know/2014/01/10/669a5c9c-7a10-11e3-8963-b4b654bcc9b2_story.html

Reichheld, F., & Sasser, W. (1990). Zero defection: quality comes to services, Harvard Business Review, pp 105–111.

Stieb, J.A. (2006). Clearing Up the Egoist Difficulty with Loyalty, The Journal of Business Ethics, vol 63, no 1.

Target. (2013). A message from CEO Gregg Steinhafel about Target’s payment card

issues. Retrieved from https://corporate.target.com/discover/article/Important-Notice-Unauthorized-access-to-payment-ca