Quantitative Management Group Department of Economics & Decision Sciences College of Business

A ski shop at a well known Idaho resort has been working on improving the quality of its operations. Following a Pareto analysis, it was determined that Customer Satisfaction is currently the most important area to be addressed for improvement. Customer satisfaction can often be gauged according to customer expenditures. So data related to per customer expenditures have been collected. A fishbone analysis indicated several factors might be considered as having a cause and effect relationship with expenditures, so values of these factors have been indicated in the data, which are contained in the Excel file custsal1.xls. (You can download that file by holding down the Shift key and clicking here.) Each observation reflects a sales transaction. The first column indicates the code for the sales associate, the second indicates the sale amount ($), the third column indicates the hour of the day (where 1 represents 8 am - 9 am, etc.), the fourth column indicates the contact time (in minutes) the associated spent with the customer prior to ringing up the sale, and the fifth column indicates the amount ($) spent on advertising that day. Use scatterplots and regression analysis to determine which, if any, of the factors has a significant relationship with customer expenditures. Indicate what the relationship is, and comment about the linearity of the relationship.