Developing the Product/ Service

Using the same organization selected in Week 1 for the course project, complete the following tasks:

Assess the types of stakeholders involved in the development process for the product/service of your chosen company.
Evaluate the impact of key inputs from stakeholder groups on new product/service development efforts.
Analyze the role these key stakeholder groups can play in contributing to the success of a new product/service.
Justify at least two persuasive strategies that can be used to engage stakeholders in new product/service development projects.
Assess the key competitive advantages that utilizing the current trends in information technology (IT) will deliver to the area of new product/service development.

Submission Details:

Submit your answers in a 3- to 4-page Microsoft Word document, using APA style. No plagiarism, 100% original. Please utilize the other 3 attached papers as a reference fo rthis paper.

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Running

DEVELOPING A MARKETING STRATEGY

DEVELOPING A MARKETING STRATEGY 2

Developing

Marketing Strategy

Nicholas Calhoun

South University

Strategic Marketing

December 10, 2019

KEY DETAILS ABOUT MY ORGANIZATION

My organization is a mobile network provider based in South Africa called MOFRICA LTD. The company has been in existence for a period of twenty-two years in the telecommunication industry, with over twenty million pools of customers. The company boasts of an increase in the number of services we offer, with the recent one being a proposal to expand to the financial market through mobile banking, we boast of a more extensive control of about 67 percent of all off net and on-net calls and 88 percent of short message transfer. A stiff competition exists between a rising company in internet service provision and us, although we still boast of a whopping 79 percent share in the market. Recently we have expanded our services to a roaming service in the neighboring nations. The expansion has seen the rise of our total income made in this year by a margin of 8 percent we attribute this to the new pool of customers made through the roaming service. Our mission statement states that we strive to give our customers a world-class standard and aim at becoming their critical partners in their daily lives as they grow to achieve their dreams through reliable telecommunication services.

SWOT ANALYSIS

Strengths

Mofrica has the longest-serving staff as compared to its competitors in the industry since its inception, and it has achieved a customer retention rate of 88 percent. This has built a pool of knowledge and expertise in the field as the older team passes the gained experience to the younger generation that is being employed (Leiber, Stensaker, & Harvey, 2018). The younger staff then comes with a new solution and the expertise shared to them, thus pushing the company’s strategic level plans ahead. The company also has the largest pool of customers as opposed to its competitors. This has given a competitive edge against the competitors. With the high number of customers, the company is able to achieve higher margins of profit as they enjoy economies of scale to a greater deal. With more income than the competitors, the organization has been able to invest in infrastructure that has boosted connectivity even to the neighboring countries.

Weaknesses

The company’s future productivity and profitability areas the company may be limited to the number of newer inventions made to meet the expected demand from the society.

Opportunity

There is a higher demand, even in the neighboring countries. People want to communicate in the comfort of their seats. The younger generation has also increased the demand for internet opening doors for more income from them. There is also an untapped market on mobile banking, and the company is eyeing to meet this demand. The banking sector is evolving to eco-friendly systems and customer-based services at once comfort, which will switch the demand now to mobile banking (McDonald, 2016).

Threats

The market has posed the following threats to our company: Political threat, there has been a rise in the political instability with various groups rising against each other in the nation. This increased racism has seen the company experience bias talks and a threat to the grouping of the company’s employees who represent all the races in the nation into their ethnic cocoons. The country has also been experiencing problems with power supply (Sutrisno, Kwon, Gunawan, Eldridge& Lee, 2016). Other places have not yet been connected to the national grid. Our service is depended on the gadget, and maximum profitability is achieved when the users’ devices have power. With the outages, our users fail to use the system and in general, increase the running cost of our systems since they will be underutilized. This goes a long way in affecting the total income and profit gain at the end of the year.

Trends

The Internet has also been criticized as the leading cause in the moral degradation of the younger generation, and campaigns are being conducted on how we offer these services, making a slow pick up of the provisions of the internet by the massed. This is a threat to our future plans to the expansion of even faster internet that what we are currently providing (Tardan, Shihab & Yudhoatmojo, 2017, October).

Analyze the organization’s mission statement

The company’s mission statement addresses the core competencies as follows: Service to our pool of customers those whom we have already reached receive our services, the services providers are all in one package as the telecommunication service. The current mission statement has not addressed the market to a specific market (Gürel & Tat, 2017). Our core competency, according to the mission statement, is reliability and close partnership to the customer. The company’s mission statement measures success through the enrichment of the customer and their general growth towards achieving individual goals.

New mission statement

To bring new values to society, our customers, and shareholders by innovation and instituting quality management in the provision of telecommunication services and related infrastructure through a self-driven and purposeful competent staff. With this new mission statement, there is a purposeful drive-in serving a target group of customers in a specific society and an improved measurability mechanism of general success.

Reference

Gürel, E., & Tat, M. (2017). SWOT analysis: A theoretical review. Journal of International Social Research, 10(51).Retrieved form:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Emet_Guerel/publication/319367788_SWOT_ANALYSIS_A_THEORETICAL_REVIEW/links/5a09f172a6fdcc2736de9e82/SWOT-ANALYSIS-A-THEORETICAL-REVIEW

Leiber, T., Stensaker, B., & Harvey, L. C. (2018). Bridging theory and practice of impact evaluation of quality management in higher education institutions: a SWOT analysis. European Journal of Higher Education, 8(3), 351-365. Retrieved from:

https://srhe.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21568235.2018.1474782

McDonald, M. A. L. C. O. L. M. (2016). Strategic marketing planning: theory and practice. In The marketing book (pp. 108-142). Routledge. Retrieved from:

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781315890005/chapters/10.4324/9781315890005-13

Sutrisno, A., Kwon, H. M., Gunawan, I., Eldridge, S., & Lee, T. R. (2016). Integrating SWOT analysis into the FMEA methodology to improve corrective action decision making. Retrieved from:

https://hekyll.services.adelaide.edu.au/dspace/handle/2440/98411

Tardan, P. P., Shihab, M. R., & Yudhoatmojo, S. B. (2017, October). Digital marketing strategy for mobile commerce, collaborative consumption startups. In 2017 International Conference on Information Technology Systems and Innovation (ICITSI) (pp. 309-314). IEEE.Retrieved from:

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8267962/

Running Head:
DEVELOPING A MARKETING STRATEGY

Developing
a

Marketing Strategy

Nicholas Calhoun

South University

Strategic Marketing

December 10, 2019

Running Head: DEVELOPING A MARKETING STRATEGY 1

Developing a Marketing Strategy

Nicholas Calhoun

South University

Strategic Marketing

December 10, 2019

Nicholas

Calhoun

Strategic

Marketing

South

Universi

December

27,

2019

Summarize the key product/service offered by your organization, including the role of the customer service department or direct service required to make a sale to the customer.

Telecommunications, also known as telecom, is the exchange of information over significant distances by electronic means and refers to all types of voice, data, and video transmission. This is a broad term that includes a wide range of information transmitting technologies such as telephones (wired and wireless), microwave communications, fiber optics, satellites, radio and television broadcasting, the internet and telegraphs.

Telecommunication is one of the few businesses in the South Africa that new competitors could hardly join. It’s because the Telecommunication industry is highly concentrated in terms of the budget by the government, plus the various fees and licenses considered necessary for operation. This kind of business environment creates a duopolistic structure in the telecommunication industry in the country. Also, the current good fiscal standing of the country together with the strong growth of internet usage makes the telecommunication industry in the South Africa an attractive industry to invest even though the products and services that contributes revenue to the industry are either weakening or is slowly declining. Mofrica is one of the big players in the telecommunication industry in the South Africa.

Mofrica has an active and dedicated customer service including social media. It has a twitter account created to respond to the issues and queries of the customers. This support service offered by Mofrica is active and responds quickly. The company has been in existence for a period of twenty-two years in the telecommunication industry, with over twenty million pools of customers. The company also has the largest pool of customers as opposed to its competitors. This has given a competitive edge against the competitors. With the high number of customers, the company is able to achieve higher margins of profit as they enjoy economies of scale to a greater deal. With more income than the competitors, the organization has been able to invest in infrastructure that has boosted connectivity even to the neighboring countries. A stiff competition exists between a rising company in internet service provision and us, although we still boast of a whopping 79 percent share in the market. Recently we have expanded our services to a roaming service in the neighboring nations. The expansion has seen the rise of our total income made in this year by a margin of 8 percent we attribute this to the new pool of customers made through the roaming service. Our mission statement states that we strive to give our customers a world-class standard and aim at becoming their critical partners in their daily lives as they grow to achieve their dreams through reliable telecommunication services

Flowchart:

The Task Environment of a company is the environment which directly affects the company from attaining their business goals. In brief, it is the set of conditions that directly affect the organization from attaining their goals which are derived from suppliers, distributors, customers, stock markets, and competitors. In addition, task environment refers to the forces and institutions outside the organization with which an organization interfaces in the course of conducting its business. These forces and institutions are directly significant to the attainment of the company’s goals because they have direct and immediate impact on decisions and actions of managers. The important components of task environment are: customers and clients, suppliers, and competitors.

As per the above flow chart, order is placed by a customer to front sales executive. That executive bills the amount to customer. Once the payment is received, he/she passes the order to operational staff and deposits the fund to accountant. Here, operational staff prepares and delivers the order and accountant readies the bill. With further documentation, it is forwarded for further processing. All these set of activities are properly monitored and supervised by team leader for effective and efficient delivery.

All above roles are mandatory and interdependent on each other. For an example, payment is collected by sales executive but order is prepared by operational staff. If order is not prepared on time, payment will be returned back to the customer. Further, replenishment of inventory is mandatory for successful delivery of orders. Thus, without positive contributions from each other, service delivery process cannot be completed with a success.

Taking into consideration the dominant market position of Mofrica in the land telephony segment, and the rising trend in IP telephony usage, the Group’s market shares in traditional land telephony decreased for the past few years as a result of entry of alternative operators in that segment. Market share of Mofrica in land telephony is still high at more than 70%, which indicates that the Company provides land telephony services for 500 thousand. In 2015 its market share decreased by 2.3 %.

Analyze at least three possible contact point failures in the service delivery process for your organization. Why do you consider these to be possible contact point failures?

The telecom companies prefer to provide quality services to the target customers along with various consumer-friendly call, SMS and data facility. The human resource department of telecom sector guides the employees and supports employees to provide quality service facilities.

The telecom industry is a constantly evolving industry where human resource managers cannot get sufficient time to provide training. Hence, various staffs remain unskilled and improperly capable. Moreover, the lack of communication in the human resource department is one of the critical obstacles which restricts the sector to grow adequately.

There are some factors to consider in succeeding in the telecommunication industry in the South Africa. The most important factor is the reliability of the products and the service they provide and the level of satisfaction their subscribers enjoy. This is considered are a critical stage for the competitors in the telecommunication industry. Having those factors on the right track will surely lead the company to success.

The knowledge gap includes the failure in the service delivery process wherein there is the gap in the service quality process.

The standards gap is the problem in the perception of the management regarding the expectations of the customers towards the design of the service delivery process.

When the organization has the lack of goals then it can affect the management.

There was a gap of communication between the actual service delivered and what the external communication of the organization promised regarding the service.

Recommendation:

The company must improve on its customer satisfaction and technical expertise in dealing with network reliability issues by having more customer service and technical training to all its employees and hire new employees with good customer service expertise and with necessary skills and knowledge of its work. Also, the management must lower its corporate hierarchy by at least 1 level for better upper management visibility, creating a clear escalation procedures and complaint prioritization and easy and user-friendly survey and feedback forms and procedures that is regularly reviewed by top management and tied to each employee’s key performance indicator. Below are few recommendations for the company.

· Make a high customer service skill as a major factor in hiring new employees

· Hire industry experts on customer service into the company

· Get individual consultants and companies to advise MOFRICA LTD on how to improve its internal business processes to be more focus on customer satisfaction

· Conduct customer service training from internal and external sources

· Empower management to be more involve in dealing with customer complaints and issues.

Developing the service skills of employees will have an opportunity for the MOFRICA LTD in attracting more customers and it will be a good practice for the company for more revenue and income recognition.

References

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Babin, B. J., & Zikmund, W. G. (2016). Essentials of marketing research. Retrieved from;

https://www.worldcat.org/title/essentials-of-marketing-research/oclc/1100700046

Dillman, D. A., Smyth, J. D., & Christian, L. M. (2014). Internet, phone, mail, and mixed-mode surveys: The tailored design method. Retrieved from;

https://www.worldcat.org/title/internet-phone-mail-and-mixed-mode-surveys-the-tailored-design-method/oclc/1016880878

Karam, A., & Ken Wilcox. (2016). The China factor: Leveraging emerging business strategies to compete, grow, and win in the new global economy. Hoboken, N.J: Wiley. Retrieved from;

https://www.worldcat.org/title/china-factor-leveraging-emerging-business-strategies-to-compete-grow-and-win-in-the-new-global-economy/oclc/1010460788

Patton, M. Q. (2014). Qualitative research & evaluation methods: Integrating theory and practice. Retrieved from;

https://www.worldcat.org/title/qualitative-research-evaluation-methods-integrating-theory-and-practice/oclc/931600934

Nicholas

Calhoun

Strategic

Marketing

South

Universi
ty

December

27,

2019

Nicholas Calhoun

Strategic Marketing

South University

December 27, 2019

Running

Head: COLLECTING CUSTOMER DATA

COLLECTING CUSTOMER DATA 7

Nicholas C

alhoun

Strategic Marketing

uth University

December

16,

2019

Collecting Customer Data

Research the key elements of a CRM system and defend at least three best practices that your organization can use to improve its customer retention.

A CRM type of system is identified as a software tool which assists in the management of interactions with company constituents. In order for a company using CRM such as Mofrica to be successful, the system ought to be efficient enough to track along with report information regarding the type of people that they engage within a manner that helps in the attainment of goals. Mofrica CRM should possess various elements for it to be successful. These elements are integrating technology since it is a networking company this element will help in enhancing efficient coordination as well as in enhancing service delivery (Singh & Chanda, 2014). The second element is conduction of continuous measurement as well as improvement which is essential in enhancing improved performance in the company. The other element is updated customer information which is readily accessible to all the company stakeholders as this will help in the delivery of better as well as personalized services.

There are a variety of strategies that Mofrica can use in ensuring effective customer service. They include segmentation of customers which helps in understanding the different needs of each customer that the organization serves. The organization is able to set goals along with objectives for every segment of its customers. Another strategy is communicating often and in an easy way. It helps in keeping in touch with all its customers as well as uncovering current opportunities. Nonetheless, there is use of social collaborating tips. There are varieties of social media platforms that Mofrica can use to maintain its quality in networking services and by using social media to brand itself and manage its customers, Mofrica is in a better position to enhance its quality (Al-Rabayah & Alsmadi, 2017).

Justify at least five critical pieces of customer information needed from your key market segment. Why do you need to collect this specific data?

These pieces of data entail user experience which helps in prioritizing the various features of the company and in the creation of a better user encounter with the products and the services of the company. It can also help the organization understand the functions that are popularly used. The second piece of data is learning how they discovered the business as this helps in measuring the effectiveness the sales as well as the marketing teams of the company. The other piece of data is purchase behavior of the customers which is essential in enhancing sales as it offers information that helps the company in comprehending the buyers and their buying behavior (Karam & Ken Wilcox, 2016).

The other piece of information is the last sign-in date which is vital in targeting the customers that are slipping away from the company by getting constructive feedback on the same. Lastly, there is keeping track regarding their physical address which helps in maintaining constant communication with the customers thus having a higher customer base. All these pieces of information from the key segment of Mofrica are essential in helping the company to attain a higher competitive advantage over its rivals in the field of mobile networking.

Justify five survey questions that might be used to evaluate the segment’s experience with your organization. Why do you need to know this information?

These survey questions entail overall satisfaction which acts as a measure of how appropriately the organization is pleasing its customers. An example is; “What is your satisfaction with Mofrica?” The other question is an attribute question such as; “What is your personal satisfaction with the Mofrica mobile networking services and products?” This will help in measurement of particular aspects of satisfaction within the organization thus understanding what areas exactly to improve on. The other questions are behavioral questions which can be; “How likely are you to come back again to Mofrica?” This question helps in gaining insights in the intended behavior (Babin & Zikmund, 2016).

Nonetheless, another question is demographic question such as; “What is your familiarity with Mofrica?” It helps in understanding any notable distinctions between the segmented audiences. The other type of survey question is an open-ended one such as those regarding an open slot for feedback on Mofrica products and services. It gives customers an opportunity to offer deep and comprehensive explanations on Mofrica products and services.

Justify a plan for how customer data will be collected. The plan should detail the methods to be used and where those methods will be integrated into the organization’s processes

The customer data of the key segments of Mofrica customers will be collected in two major ways. These techniques are online surveys as well as email campaigns. Online surveys entail gathering information from people on online platforms such as social media platforms like Facebook (Dillman & Christian, 2014). Email campaigns are methods of surveys that companies use to attain information from its customers through emails sent to subscribers of its products. Email surveys will be sent to all the customers of Mofrica Company on their satisfaction regarding the company products and overall satisfaction on Mofrica Company operations.

Online surveys that will be carried out in Facebook pages as well as Twitter pages and LinkedIn of Mofrica will entail survey questions that will be open ended whereby customers can give their feedback on Mofrica to help in improvement of the services and products of the company. All these techniques will facilitate efficiency in enhancing customer care at Mofrica and improving performance at the company which will facilitate improved competence in the organization and enhance the sales of Mofrica (Patton et al., 2014).

References

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Al-Rabayah, W., Khasawneh, R. T., Abu-Shamaa, R., & Alsmadi, I. (2017). Strategic uses of social media for improved customer retention. Retrieved from;

https://www.worldcat.org/title/strategic-uses-of-social-media-for-improved-customer-retention/oclc/1005699682