A new Slop University paper scores 96 supermarket and strip-mall branches against a five-level price-match maturity model and finds attained level predicts neither claim approval nor resolution time, though one chain now sets floor-staff bonuses from it alone.
A five-level model scored across 96 supermarket and strip-mall branches predicts neither claim approval nor speed, and a chain sets bonuses from it regardless.
A new paper from the School of Continuous Improvement puts a number on something shoppers have long wondered about quietly at the service desk: how seriously a store takes its own price-match promise. Led by Postdoctoral Fellow Joost Nwosu, the Adaptive Metrics Lab specified PMRM, a five-level model scoring how a branch handles a shopper’s price-match claim, from an unlogged manager’s say-so to an automatic match at the scanner, then checked ninety-six branches’ attained level against fourteen months of independently logged shopper outcomes.
The score, the researchers found, predicted almost nothing about what a shopper actually experienced. The result sits inside the School’s ongoing effort to be plain about the distance between what an institution can measure of itself and what that measurement is worth to the people the institution serves.
A maturity model tells you who is authorised to say yes. It was never built to tell you whether yes is the right answer, and we shouldn’t have assumed it did.
— Dr Joost Nwosu, Postdoctoral Fellow in the School of Continuous Improvement
The finding, in Lecturer Ingeborg Nwachukwu’s words, “sits comfortably beside everything else the Capability Sprints cohort has learned about the gap between a credential and the habit it’s meant to certify.”
The audit paired an unannounced site assessment against the model’s five criteria with a separately commissioned programme of covert shopper visits, keeping the scoring exercise and the outcome measurement apart from the outset. One chain has since made attained level the sole input to a floor-staff bonus scheme, a step the paper reports without further comment.
The full paper is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.mq3llj.