Total customer experience
Assignment Question:

In today’s increasingly competitive market environment, The Total Customer Experience’ remains as one domain where marketing strategies and actions can secure a sustainable business future through effective brand positioning that is supported by relevant marketing value based deliverables.

With reference to this statement, select an organisation where significant improvements can be made to the total customer experience and then show where and how justified changes can be made.

Attention should be given to:

1. The adoption of the marketing concept as a working business culture.
(What is marketing communication, How well has your marketing department has adapted. I it a market oriented firm?)

2. Understanding Customers and Segmenting Customers.
(Do they understand customers, BB, B2C, org. Behaviour, give examples of improving segmentation, positioning etc.)

3. Analysing Needs, Wants, Values and Expectations of Customers.
(Consumer Buying Behaviour, Do they strike to improve the change , needs and wants of customers.)

4. Creating Customer-based Value Propositions for Customer Segments
(Do they really understand their needs they change all the time. Create customer based proposition. Price for each segment. E.G. Blockbuster didn’t once they were successful but then stayed in Cashcow, The world changed. PLC moved on but they didn’t.

5. Managing the Customer Experience through Relationship Marketing & Customer Care.
(Do they have loyalty card systems, Customer data base loyalty programme, customer relationship form, long-term relationship customer care programme.)

6. Reinforcing the Organisation’s Identity (or Brands) through changes to the Marketing Mix Variables.
(Branding, what does this meanto ppl. Does it have an image. Brand propostion is it clear, vision and values.

7. Research Requirements for the Organisation to track the Total Customer Experience.
(Do they use Research Marketing. How is the total customer experience).

8. The Outcomes from becoming more Customer Centric
€¢ For each of the above areas, the existing position should be stated and then desired position be projected so that the MBA student has clarity about where the organisation is now and where it needs to be to achieve relevance in a highly competitive market environment.

€¢ The purpose of the discussion paper is for the marketing team to reflect, discuss and agree on agenda of items for change.

Marking Criteria

The discussion paper will contribute 3600 words and 80% of the marks, allocated equally between the above 8 parts, 20% of marks and 400 words will be devoted to:

1. A research plan to show how the assignment was tackled.
2. Evidence Sources and Literature used as a basis for the discussion document.
Assessment Requirements:

€¢ The submission of your work assessment should be organized and clearly structured in a report format.

€¢ Maximum word length allowed is 4000 words, excluding words in charts & tables and in the appendixes section of your assignment.

€¢ This assignment is worth 100% of the final assessment of the module.

€¢ Student is required to submit a type-written document in Microsoft Word format with Times New Roman font type, size 12 and line spacing 1.5.

€¢ Indicate the sources of information and literature review by including all the necessary citations and references adopting the Harvard Referencing System.

€¢ Students who have been found to have committed acts of Plagiarism are automatically considered to have failed the entire module. If found to have breached the regulation for the second time, you will be asked to leave the course.

€¢ Plagiarism involves taking someone else’s words, thoughts, ideas or essays from online essay banks and trying to pass them off as your own. It is a form of cheating which is taken very seriously.

Report Structure

Title Page

Table of Contents

Abstract

Introduction

Question 1

Question 2

Question 3

Question 4

Question 5

Question 6

Question 7

Question 8

Conclusions

References

Research Plan

Literature Evidence

Notes on Plagiarism & Harvard Referencing

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is passing off the work of others as your own. This constitutes academic theft and is a serious matter which is penalized in assignment marking.

Plagiarism is the submission of an item of assessment containing elements of work produced by another person(s) in such a way that it could be assumed to be the student’s own work. Examples of plagiarism are:

€¢ The verbatim copying of another person’s work without acknowledgement
€¢ The close paraphrasing of another person’s work by simply changing a few words or altering the order of presentation without acknowledgement
€¢ The unacknowledged quotation of phrases from another person’s work and/or the presentation of another person’s idea(s) as one’s own.

Copying or close paraphrasing with occasional acknowledgement of the source may also be deemed to be plagiarism is the absence of quotation marks implies that the phraseology is the student’s own.

Plagiarised work may belong to another student or be from a published source such as a book, report, journal or material available on the internet.

Harvard Referencing

The structure of a citation under the Harvard referencing system is the author’s surname, year of publication, and page number or range, in parentheses, as illustrated in the Smith example near the top of this article.

€¢ The page number or page range is omitted if the entire work is cited. The author’s surname is omitted if it appears in the text. Thus we may say: Jones (2001) revolutionized the field of trauma surgery.

€¢ Two or three authors are cited using and or &: (Deane, Smith, and Jones, 1991) or (Deane, Smith & Jones, 1991). More than three authors are cited using et al. (Deane et al. 1992).

€¢ An unknown date is cited as no date (Deane n.d.). A reference to a reprint is cited with the original publication date in square brackets (Marx [1867] 1967, p. 90).

€¢ If an author published two books in 2005, the year of the first (in the alphabetic order of the references) is cited and referenced as 2005a, the second as 2005b.

€¢ A citation is placed wherever appropriate in or after the sentence. If it is at the end of a sentence, it is placed before the period, but a citation for an entire block quote immediately follows the period at the end of the block since the citation is not an actual part of the quotation itself.

€¢ Complete citations are provided in alphabetical order in a section following the text, usually designated as Works cited or References. The difference between a works cited or references list and a bibliography is that a bibliography may include works not directly cited in the text.

€¢ All citations are in the same font as the main text.
Examples

Examples of book references are:

€¢ Smith, J. (2005a). Dutch Citing Practices. The Hague: Holland Research Foundation.

€¢ Smith, J. (2005b). Harvard Referencing. London: Jolly Good Publishing.

In giving the city of publication, an internationally well-known city (such as London, The Hague, or New York) is referenced as the city alone. If the city is not internationally well known, the country (or state and country if in the U.S.) are given.

Examples of journal references are:

€¢ Smith, John Maynard. The origin of altruism, Nature 393, 1998, pp. 639-40.
€¢ Bowcott, Owen. Street Protest, The Guardian, October 18, 2005, accessed February 7, 2006.