Customer Compatibility Exercise Application

Customers impose considerable variability on the operating systems of service organizations. They show up when they wish (arrival variability), they ask for different things (request variability), they vary in their willingness and ability to help themselves (effort and capability variability), and they have different preferences (subjective preference variability). All this variability leaves the front lines of many service organizations struggling to deliver consistent, high-quality service. The Customer Compatibility Exercise provides students with a window into this reality through the lens of their own experiences, surfacing lessons about the daunting and seemingly-incongruous task of reactively managing customer relationships and efficient operations. Moreover, analysis of student data provided through the exercise reveals a set of proactive strategies that companies can use to pursue more compatible customer relationships.
In Phase I of this exercise, students are invited to document two of their own face-to-face interactions with service providers. In Phase II, after all students have documented their experience interactions, a searchable online gallery is launched so that students can browse and learn from each other’s experiences, as well as highlight service interactions they find interesting and would like to discuss in class. During the third and final Phase III, certain underlying trends and correlations between key attributes are identified by graphical analysis of the recorded data. This final analysis sets the stage for the introduction of strategies companies can use to proactively cultivate more compatible customer relationships, yielding delighted customers and more efficient operations.