A sales manager might observe that customers are perhaps not as pleased as they used to be.

The
manager may not be certain that this is really the case but may experience anxiety and some
uneasiness that customer satisfaction is on the decline. This process of observation or sensing of
the phenomena around us is what gets most of the research—whether applied or basic—started.
The next step for the manager is to determine whether there is a real problem, and if so, how
serious it is. This problem identification calls for some preliminary data gathering. The
manager might talk casually to a few customers to find out how they feel about the p