Suppose that top management of a large national bank has asked your HR department to develop and test a training program for customer service reps who answer the bank’s 1-800 phone number when it is called by the bank’s VISA card customers. Top management wants to improve the quality of service provided by its customer service VISA reps, and you have been asked to design a training program and also an email Survey that could be completed by customers after they have talked to a Customer Service rep.

You decide to develop a training program for these reps and to randomly assign reps to one of two groups: (1) an Experimental Group that would complete the HR-designed training program intended to improve the quality of customer service, and (2) a Control Group of reps that did not experience this training program. This type of experimental design is called an “After-only with Control Group Design” (see, for example, McDaniel and Gates 2013, pp. 190–191).

You want to test the effectiveness of the HR training program for 3 weeks starting 2 weeks after the training program has been completed by collecting data from an email survey, and Item #10 of this survey is a key question on the survey that asks customers to rate the quality of service provided by the customer service representative that they talked to on a 7-point scale where 1¼Poor and 7¼Excellent. Let’s suppose that the Experimental Group had 34 customers and that their mean score was 6.24 with a standard deviation of 1.12, while the Control Group had 37 customers with a mean of 4.37 and a standard deviation of 1.54.

(a) State the null hypothesis and the research hypothesis on an Excel spreadsheet.

(b) Find the standard error of the difference between the means using Excel

(c) Find the critical t value using Appendix E, and enter it on your spreadsheet.

(d) Perform a t-test on these data using Excel. What is the value of t that you obtain?

(e) State your result on your spreadsheet.

(f) State your conclusion in plain English on your spreadsheet.

(g) Save the file as: HR30