The Barcelona Mobile World Congress - Teaching Note

Populations are usually too big to be observed in their entirety. What we do, in practice, is to draw a sample from the population, perform our statistical analysis on the sample and extrapolate our results to the population. This is an example of statistical inference. The objective of the case is to illustrate a simple exercise of inference. The data set, supplied in an Excel file (mwc-data.xls), contains the results of a customer service satisfaction survey, which included five questions related to customers' satisfaction with different aspects of their experience at a hotel. Each question was answered using a 0-5 scale (from 0-bad to 5-excellent). The data is split into two groups: visitors who did not return the following year and those who did. Students are expected to calculate confidence limits for the mean satisfaction of the groups of customers separately and to understand how to interpret the figures they obtain. Very basic knowledge of Excel or an analogous open source spreadsheet application is sufficient.