Customer Satisfaction

Introduction

Total quality environments requires that an organization make customer satisfaction its primary focus, and that keeping customers satisfied requires that the organization continually improve the goods or services it provides to the customers (Goetsch & Davis, 2021). This paper discusses customer satisfaction in the context of America Online (AOL) by listing who the customers are, how their needs are identified, and how those needs are satisfied. Particular attention is paid to IT-specific methods of determining customer needs.

Customers

For AOL, the external customers can be divided as follows: paying customers using dialup and non-paying customers who "bring their own Internet." A third class of external customers would be companies that choose to advertise on AOL's websites.

Internal customers are all the employees. This includes managers, executive assistants, subject matter experts, QA staff, software developers, customer support, sales, advertiser support, accountants, system administrators, and network engineers. I'm unfamiliar with the business side of AOL, and there are surely other types of employees besides accountants, sales staff, and advertiser support.

Determining Needs

Importance is placed on satisfying both external and internal customers, as both types of customers are needed for business survival. The needs of external customers are primarily self-identified - if customers are unable to connect to AOL's services, they know they have a need! Additional needs - ones that may be unknown to external customers - can be anticipated by an information-gathering plan which can include customer focus groups (Goetsch & Davis, 2021, p. 96-99). AOL’s competitors will also be doing this.

Additional approaches to determining external customer needs used in the IT industry include "vaporware" and "mechanical Turks." (da Costa, 2022) With vaporware, a company announces that it is working on a factitious product to judge the interest level of external customers. If interest is high, then development of the product actually begins; if not, no cost was invested.

Vaporware marketing, most commonly associated with building “pre-launch buzz” is a unique strategy that revolves around generating excitement and anticipation for a product or service that is still in its early developmental stages and not ready to be released commercially. (Grant, 2023)

With mechanical Turks (and with a similar idea called "the automatable agency"), a product is built that actually depends on humans to do the work. If the product is seen as popular and valuable, this product can be automated, which allows it to scale. If not, the product can either continue to be run manually, or it can be discontinued. (de Costa, 2022).

Internal customers' needs are primarily determined by the role they play within the company. For example, developers depend on QA testers, subject matter experts, and so on. These needs can be determined in various formal and informal methods (Goetsch & Davis, 2021, p. 97), but the needs are often implicit in the job title.

Satisfying Needs

Customer support teams satisfy the needs of external customers (either paying or nonpaying). Most members of the support teams are trained to address basic technical questions as well as billing questions. When they cannot satisfy a customer's needs, they are transferred to a higher-level support person. The needs of advertisers are met through sales teams and advertiser support teams: companies that advertise with AOL provide AOL with ad content (usually a graphic) as well as money to deliver the ad to our paying and non-paying customers. In return, we provide the advertisers with statistics about the number of customer views and click-throughs.

The needs of internal customers are, for the most part, met by other internal customers. For example, the needs of developers are met by QA testers, subject matter experts, and so on. Also, developers can meet the needs of other developers, almost always in an informal manner and with minimal or no interactions with management.

Conclusion

External and internal customers change according to both the maturity and the success of the company or organization in question. Determining the needs of these customers can be done in a variety of means, including some means that are specific to the IT industry. To maintain customer loyalty, it is necessary to continually improve the products and services the company offers as well as anticipate new customer needs.

References

da Costa, L. (2022, 24 August). The minimum viable nothing: Ideas to validate products without building them. https://lucasfcosta.com/2022/08/24/minimum-viable-nothing.html

Goetsch, D. L., & Davis, S. B. (2021). Quality management for organizational excellence: Introduction to total quality (9^th ed.). Pearson.

Grant, V. (2023, 4 August). Selling the invisible: vaporware marketing deconstructed. https://quantumidentitygroup.medium.com/selling-the-invisible-vaporware-marketing-deconstructed-8615b59ce552