An examination of customer loyalty and customer participation in the service recovery process in the Pakistani hotel industry: A pitch

This pitch research letter (PRL) applies the pitch template developed by Faff (2015) to an academic project on customer loyalty and customer participation in the service recovery process in the hotel industry of Pakistan. The pitch template helped the pitchers to identify the core elements that form the framework of the research project. This PRL provides a brief background about the pitchers and pitch, followed by a brief commentary on the pitch and personal reflections of the pitcher on the pitch exercise itself.


Introduction
This letter is a discussion of the application of the pitch template developed by Faff (2015), which is readily adaptable in many fields including business studies, physics, mathematics, computer science, humor, organic chemistry, phytology, pharmacy, philosophy. I am the second author currently doing Master of Business Administration (MBA) (leading to MPhil) with a marketing specialization at the University of the Punjab, Pakistan. In the first semester of the MBA, Prof. Ahmad I and my coauthor have found this pitch template to be, as suggested by Faff (2015), a 'simple and systematic approach' to organizing research ideas. The template focuses ideas into key areas, giving clear and concise direction in planning and structuring the research idea.
The remainder of this pitch letter is organized as follows. Section 2 contains a brief commentary on the completed pitch. Section 3 offers personal reflections on the exercise of completing the pitch, and section 4 concludes the pitch letter.

Brief commentary on the application of the pitch template
The initial pitch template was completed over a period of one week, which was then work-shopped with other academics, updated and completed within two weeks. During that time, we spent approximately 15 hours together and 10 hours individually working on the pitch, which included meeting with several academics to discuss various elements and refining the written version of the pitch. Table 1 shows the completed pitch template for the research project. Section (A) describes the working title: "An examination of customer loyalty and customer participation in the service recovery process in the Pakistani hotel industry".
An examination of customer loyalty and customer participation in the service recovery process in the Pakistani  There is no research work done on the growing hotel industry in Pakistan especially in the service recovery process when service-based employees fail to perform. According to Gardezi (2014) the hotel industry in Pakistan shows gradual growth since 2012 and in the first quarter of 2014, the growth rate was 7% more than the corresponding previous year. The local hotel industry contributes about 20% to GDP.

THREE
Three core aspects of any empirical research project i.e. the "IDioTs" guide (E) Idea?
The core idea is to identify the moderating effect of customer loyalty and customer participation in the service recovery process in the hotel industry of Pakistan, with perceived effort and perceived fairness as independent variables. Central hypothesis: Customer loyalty and customer participation enhance the customer satisfaction in the service recovery process. Theoretical "tension": exploit the service recovery process when one firm fails to perform the services. (F) Data? 1) Country/setting: Pakistan because hotel industry is increasing day by day in Pakistan. 2) Unit of analysis: individuals. Sampling: random sampling technique 3) Expected sample size: cross sectional study and rule of 10 is used for calculating sample size that is 220. Time frame: 3 months, 1 st January to March 31, 2016. 4) Data source: data collection through previously accepted instrument; Research assistance needed?: "minor" assistance; Funding/grants?: not essential for viability, but potential opportunities. 5) Standard datanothing novel, high quality data collected from questionnaire. IDEA is novel -there is no work on service recovery in hotel industry. IDEA is the "driver", and data/tools are the "passengers": first time data are collected from the complainant that is registered by the firm and data are collected from adult individuals. Data/Tools are STRONG passengers. Mickey Mouse/ Venn diagram. Yes as shown in Figure 1.

(I) So What?
The result of this research will be very important for the hotel industry regarding customer satisfaction. It also assessed the relationship theory of marketing in service sector. Clarifying the role of customer loyalty and customer participation towards customer satisfaction will be insightful for practice.

ONE One bottom line (J) Contribution?
The relevant contribution in literature is to critically assess the theory of relationship marketing, through empirical testing. It will improve the service recovery process of hotel industry and also enhance the customer relationship management.

(K) Other Considerations
Confirming Faff's (2016) predictions, this pitch was completed in a 'non-linear' manner. This was largely due to the fact that the exercise of completing the pitch template began initially as a hypothetical exercise to satisfy the second author's personal curiosity as to whether we thought the tool was a worthwhile device that we could use for future research projects. This completed pitch has now morphed into a fledgling project, and we now working on completing the research project based on the pitch. Section (B) reveals the basic research question, that is: Does the nature of the relationship really matter? Section (C) cites the three key papers: Cambra-Fierro et al. (2014); Grönroos & Voima (2013); and Kandampully et al. (2015).
Section (D) is about motivation or puzzle related to our research work. There is no prior research done on the growing hotel industry in Pakistan especially in service recovery process, when employees fail to perform service as so many complaints are registered daily in this industry. According to Gardezi (2014), the hotel industry in Pakistan showed gradual growth since 2012 and, in the first quarter of 2014, the growth rate was 7% more than the corresponding previous year, which is encouraging. Moreover, the hotel industry contributes about 20% to Pakistan GDP.
There are three core aspects of any empirical research project i.e. the "IDioTs" guide. Idea, data and tools are the most important in academic research and it can often be very lengthy and difficult to describe the research methodology but Faff's (2015) research template is very helpful to understand for the novice researchers and supervisors.
Sections (H) (I), and (J) deal with novelty and implications in accordance with our research. In last part of the template, we describe the contribution of our research to the relevant literature.

Personal reflection on the pitch exercise
As we are novice researchers, it was a challenging task to develop research ideas into a formal research proposal. We faced a lot of difficulties to start it but it was manageable with proper guidance of my course instructor Ahmad Ashraf and a student of Robert Faff, Searat Ali who gave complete guidelines. The pitch template has provided us with a systematic, guided, almost fool-proof tool to put my thoughts into a manageable and usable format. It is very challenging to make my thoughts concise, especially the motivation and basic research question. Ali's (2016aAli's ( , 2016b pitch also helped us to understand how to write a pitch letter. From our perspective, the important parts of the template are the novelty in the research relative to the literature and, likewise, what is the incremental contribution. We also found it very helpful that the template asks us to think about the target journal.

Conclusion
This letter outlines our basic pitch for a proposed services marketing research project based on an examination of the parts of customer loyalty and customer participation in the process of service recovery in the hotel industry of Pakistan. This pitch has been used to discuss the research proposal with a senior academic who is now working with me on the project. In the end, the purpose of the pitch template to produce a solid plan has been achieved in this case. We found the process of completing our first pitch template to be very challenging (and quite confronting at times). In our view, Faff's (2015Faff's ( , 2016 pitch template is now becoming an essential tool for research paper development by novice researchers.