Customer Satisfaction, Loyalty, Management and Empowerment

Learning Outcomes

Customer empowerment.  Student can identify how their chosen product or service offering uses social networks to communicate and empower customers to be part of the marketing process.

Customer satisfaction. Student can identify how customers communicate their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the chosen product or service offering.

Customer Relationship Management.  Student can explain customer lifetime value and how a customer relationship management program can have a role in attracting and retaining most valuable customers.

Customer privacy. Student can identify the product or service offerings privacy policy and analyze its effectiveness in protecting their customer’s information.

Directions

You may want to find a Most Valuable Customer (MVC) of the product or service if you are not one yourself, or alternatively think like an MVC. What is the evidence of an MVC of your product or service? It isn't just that the customer regularly buys the product or service.  It means that the customer is treated differently -- better -- than other customers. It means that the MVC represents about 20% of the company's revenues. These are the customers with whom the company regularly communicates, offers special deals, and other ways as outlined in the text and as you can find with just a little bit of googling on the internet.

You may want to calculate the lifetime value of a most valuable customer. See the discussion of the lifetime value calculation in the week's reading, and calculate the LTV using this simple equation: LTV = (Price - cost to produce the product) * number of annual purchases * number of years expected to purchase - initial acquisition costs. For simplicity sake, you can assume your customer will have a relationship with you for ten years and you can make an educated guess as to how much the initial acquisition costs were to get him as a customer in terms of advertising or other types of promotion efforts.   If you are not an MVC yourself, make and share your assumptions about your calculation. If you are not an MVC, you might want to find someone who is and ask them why they are loyal to the product or service and what they feel the company does for them that is special that they don't do for other customers.

You may need call or visit a store to take a look at your product or service if the website does not provide you everything you need to evaluate the company's product or service privacy policy. Usually the privacy policy is available on the website.

Answer the following four questions in order and number the beginning of your response to each question.

Customer Empowerment.    How does your product or service offering empower its customers as discussed in the course readings this week? In other word, how are customers part of the marketing for the company? Identify the feedback vehicles they may use, especially social media. Do the social media efforts seem to be creating buzz marketing? If not, what could they do to generate more ‘buzz’?

Customer satisfaction. How does your product or service offering communicate ways for customers to express their dissatisfaction? If possible, outline what remedies the product or service may be taking to ensure satisfaction.

Customer Relationship Management. Does it appear that your product has a customer relationship management strategy? In other words, do they treat the top tier of customers differently than other customers? If so, what is your evidence? If not, should they have a CRM strategy? Or, are there compelling reasons why your product or service should treat all customers the same? Refer to course content concepts in your response.

Customer privacy. Review your product or service offering's privacy policy (usually published on its website). Analyze whether you think they do enough to protect the customer’s privacy or what steps you might suggest they take to protect customer's privacy. Refer to the privacy policies or the information on warranties and guarantees. The company's customer support page might also be useful. Do they publish a remedy should the customer's privacy be breached? Should they?

Learning focus: recognizing your personal ethical values, recognizing the importance of ethical values in the workplace, unique ethical dilemmas and decisions, personal ethical decisions

Following is a list of ethical issues that are significant in most workplaces and issues that are often associated with ethical dilemmas in organizations.

invasion of privacy

confidentiality of personnel information

being penalized for refusing to do something in violation of common morality

being penalized for after work conduct

written reasons for demotion or transfer

privacy related to accessibility of others to personnel files

Which one of these is personally most important - or would be most important - to you in the workplace and why?

Scenario: Assume you have frequently been late to work in the past several months, not for a specific reason except that you overslept several times, are often disorganized about getting your children to the school bus in the mornings, and about getting yourself ready for work. Your manager asked to meet tomorrow to discuss your tardiness. You are concerned you will be fired.

You are considering lying to your manager about the reason(s) for your tardiness.

How would you respond to your manager and why?