MSc Management Customer Experience Strategy Assignment Sample 2023
Introduction
Customers are the most important aspect of any company because, from them, a company generates profit, and their entire business efforts are dedicated to the potential customers. A company that has a loyal customer base, is considered the most competitive company in the industry. For example, Apple offers iPhones, iPods, MacBooks, and other gadgets and the company has a loyal customer base due to the best experience and satisfaction of the customer (Becker and Jaakkola, 2020).
The current study describes CX aspects regarding Apple MacBook in the UK. The study includes the importance of consumer experience, customer persona, and their journey. Along with this, the report provides an understanding of omnichannel marketing, and customer experience performance metrics, and compares customer experience of MacBook from different industries.
Task 1: The importance of customer experience
The customer experience (CX) is the key to the sustainable success of any company across all industries. CX holds a crucial place in the success of the company because a satisfied customer definitely becomes a loyal customer and having a loyal customer base provides competitive advantages. Providing excellent customer experience is one of the primary goals of every company.
Customer experience concept
With the advancement of techniques and the era of innovation, there are a lot of growth opportunities in the market which create fierce competition in the market. Companies put their immense efforts to get competitive advantages as above discuss customer experience is the key to getting competitive benefits (Rahimian et. al. 2020).
, companies emphasize enhancing customer experience by providing unique, memorable, and excellent services and the best quality products. CX is an emerging marketing concept in the manner of both theoretical and practice as it enables attracting a large group of people. In simple words, CX refers a process access by the companies to create differentiation, high values, and acquire sustainable competitive advantages.
It conceptualises as holistic component of consumer including cognitive, social, and sensory. CX must be the central area of decision-making in the company which shows its importance and value. However, the organisation needs to adopt a wide perspective and involves in robust market research to get an insight into the things which improve CX.
Thus, they require social, digital, finance, and human resources which is difficult to arrange (Hoyer et. al. 2020). Although, companies make separate provisions for CX practices in both B2C and B2B markets.
Importance of customer experience in Apple MacBook
In smartphones, PCs, and gadgets, there is tough competition because many players are involved in this market, for example, Samsung, Xiaomi, Vivo, One Plus, and many more. These companies provide new and advanced gadgets in variable ranges. On the other hand, Apple’s products are famous for their advanced security features but difficult for middle-income groups people to afford. It limits the customer base of Apple in the UK.
Regarding MacBook, it is one of the most demanded products of the company however, the customer base is small but all have an excellent experience using this product. Hence, Apple has competitive advantages but at the same time, they face fierce competition in the country (Bolton et. al. 2018). Therefore, the company often launch new products like a smartwatch, iPods, new variants of MacBooks, new iPhones, and many more.
Along with glamorising their product features and focusing on their customer experience. In order to establish a strong market presence in the UK, the company should widen its target audience by lowering its product cost.
Task 2: Consumer persona
Customer persona is the semi-functional prototype that includes the characteristics of the target customer that based on market research like Google Analytics, Web Analytics, and many more. It is important in the target market strategy-making process because it provides useful insights into customer behaviour, preferences, buying habits, and spending capacities (Lee and Lee, 2020). There are mainly three types of customers:
Hunters: they want the best quality product but a reasonable price.
Quality seekers: they want the best quality product at whatever cost.
Nomads roaming: They want an innovative product but they are not loyal to one brand.
The following are providing Apple MacBook customer persona in the UK as it is the potential foreign market for the company.
| Consumer Person of the Apple MacBook customer in the UK | |
Jack Ryan
|
Demographic and story
Live in the UK Single High-income group Quality seekers and no bars of cost for best quality products |
| Profile
25- years old Software Engineer Work in Accenture, a giant IT company |
Motivations for using an Apple MacBook
MacBook is one of the best products of Apple with advanced safety features and an amazing user experience. As a software engineer, he wants a PC with the best safety features to protect data. |
| Goals for using Apple MacBook
Wants to experience the advanced features of MacBook High-level storage capacity, and smooth operations with quick response |
Pain points solved by Apple MacBook
High RAM High storage capacity Smooth functioning Multitasking Advanced safety features Advanced quality of camera, audio, and videos Comply with 5G technology |
Task 3: Mapping customer journey
Mapping customer journey shows the overall experience of the customer while having the products (Flavián et. al. 2019). It includes all points experienced by the customers while purchasing the product. The following are presenting Jack Ryan’s journey which is mentioned in task 2.
| Mapping feature | Awareness | Consideration | Acquisition | Service |
| Stages of journey | Jack seeks the best quality and high security featured PC for coding purposes and security of data purposes. | He prefers Apple over other options due to its advanced safety features which are best over others. | Thus, he determines to buy the latest version of the MacBook. | Jack wants after-sales services which may prove a deal breaker to becoming a loyal customer. |
| Activities | He compares MacBook with other companies’ PCs by surfing Apple’s competitor’s site. | He also surfs Apple’s website and visits the Apple store to get hands-on experience. | After comparing and analysing all options, he chooses MacBook. | He buys from the Apple store. |
| Feelings and needs | Feeling excited and needing invoices and bills. | Feel confident as he is aware that MacBook fulfil its needs for advanced safety features. | Feel satisfactory and happy | He needs after-sales services and quick responses in case of raised queries. |
| Potential opportunities for improvement | Apple often launches new variants of MacBook and other products so he has the opportunity to install updates on his MacBook. | Attract with advanced and innovative product features. | Acquire an updated version of the MacBook or install a new version in an existing one. | Offer to experience advanced versions of products by the company or store. |
Task 4: Omnichannel marketing
In the era of intense competition, companies emphasis their marketing strategies to attract target audiences and improve their experience. Omnichannel marketing is one of the most useful strategies to integrate various channels of marketing companies tend to use to interact with consumers (McColl-Kennedy et. al. 2019). The omnichannel strategy helps company to engage their customers with the brand on their own defined terms and condition which leads to improved customer experience.
Moreover, it is the marketing practices used by companies for their target customers to provide information, and news updates about products and services, and guide them with two or more synchronized channels. It enhances customer experiences from initial touch points to the last. Companies use various but integrated channels to provide consistent and tailored information to customers to facilitate continuous interactions with them.
Moreover, companies use this marketing strategy to target a wide market, new groups of customers, and meet specific needs of customers.
Role of interaction and customisation in omnichannel marketing
Omnichannel CX enables to make individual customer touchpoints through different channels that interact, enabling the customer to start where they left off on one mode of the channel and continue their experience on another channel (Bleier et. al. 2019). While omnichannel customisation provides facilities to companies to deliver relevant information and tailored offerings to customers at the right place and at right time.
Companies can use all this information to send a customised message at all touchpoints and customer interactions. However, for customised offerings, the organisation has to conduct deep and robust market research to identify its customer requirements and the most usable channels. Apple, marketing strategy is very simple, their target audience is very limited and loyal who value the product.
In 2022, most of the sales around 62% generates from indirect channels including wholesalers, third-party dealers, retailers, and resellers (Shi et. al. 2020). However, these mediators are crucial for sales, subsidies, and scale.
Marketing channels for Apple MacBook
Apple is a renowned brand in the electronics and computer industry. It is world famous marketers because they believe that marketing is the most crucial aspect of business and success is heavily depending on the customer realm. As per the Forbes report, Apple is the most valuable brand valued at 263 billion Dollars and they also win CMO Survey Award for Marketing Excellence for ten years consecutively.
The company’s marketing is very robust that makes a benchmark for competitors. The specification of Apple’s marketing strategy includes product presentation and simple marketing, identifying the target audience, providing excellent customer experience, creating mystery, and hype around the product, considering product value, and building a loyal customer community (Pascual, 2019). Most importantly product placement strategy. The company’s employee closely works with Hollywood actors and they place their products in movies and television shows.
Other than that, Apple’s marketing channels include mobile phone network carriers, Apple online stores, Amazon, wholesalers, and supermarket stores. The company’s retail stores, and electronic superstores. The company uses mediators to distribute high costs over a large number of different products. They use outside manufacturers for the component of the MacBook and then transport them to China to assemble.
The company focus on customer experience in both the Apple store and online store, they minimise advertisement and make their store unique (Kandampully et. al. 2018). Hence, the marketing channel of Apple MacBook is very specific and focuses on customer experience to a limited group of loyal customers.
CX metrics are the indicator of key performance used by companies to understand customer satisfaction and loyalty. The following are discussing the CX performance metric for Apple and suggests two suitable indicators:
Net Promoter Score (NPS): It is the very useful metric used by 500 Fortune companies including Apple. It is a very easy process to measure customers’ responses. There are two questions and customers have to rate their experience between 1-10. From 2007, Apple is started to use the NPS system (Liébana-Cabanillas et. al. 2020). All employees of the company enabling this system and track regular activities that enhance customer experience with the brand. The company uses these metrics for every new product. Statistics of attendance at Apple outlets across the world is more than 1 million people per day. Moreover, the company uses NPS to get customer feedback and testimonials.
Figure 1: Example of NPS of Apple product
(Source- Service foundation for the business, 2022)
They also engage employees by accessing NPS and quickly close cycles by resolving customer queries (Service foundation for business, 2022).
Customer effort score: In this metric, customer feedbacks and inputs include which proves that it is the complete transactional metric. It enables the identification of distribution and analysis scores to evaluate CX. From this method, the organisation asks reviews from consumers about their experience while using their offerings.
Churn rate: It evaluate how many consumers pause to using the item. It measures total lost customers and the percentage of lost customers in a certain time frame. Along with this, it also calculates the lost value of the business. For instance, a company deals with 100 contract value at the end of the year but only 80 customers keep using the products (Klink et. al. 2020). So, 20 lost customer shows the churn rate which highlights the weaknesses of CX.
Customer satisfaction: Likewise, NPS, this method includes different scales in 1-5 but common scales. A company can ask a question to the customer about their satisfaction level and what elements they like most after-sales services.
Recommend two metrics
Apple already using NPS and they get immense benefits from these metrics. Hence, it can recommend that they should continue using NPS along with they should focus on customer satisfaction and churn rate. Customer satisfaction metrics are easy to implement and provide accurate outcomes about CX and insight into further improvements.
Apart from this, the company should use churn rate to identify the strengths of competitors, their own weaknesses, and areas of improvement (Lee et. al. 2018). These two methods are widely used by the companies and also provide valuable and unique information which Apple does not gain from NPS.
Task 6: CX process in different industries
All companies across industries various customer segments, several target audiences, and positioning strategies. Hence, all success factors cannot prove successful in all industries (Villani, 2018). The following are describing three different industries’ success factors to elaborate on different aspects of CX.
| Critical success factor | Apple | Zara | Tesco |
| Strategy-making | Apple focuses on the best quality product, a limited target audience, and a simple marketing strategy with high pricing (Mao et. al. 2020). | Zara is a fast fashion company and they are popular to provide the best quality products at reasonable prices and emphasis on high CX. | Tesco is one of the four big supermarkets which provide the best quality product at cheap prices and focus on after-sales services, home delivery, and high CX. |
| Stakeholders | Apple considers its stakeholders in the decision-making process (Borges et. al. 2020). They give importance to employee training and high job satisfaction. The company believes to upskill its employees which leads to maximum customer satisfaction. | Zara’s stakeholders are wide and they mostly use vertical integration to hold maximum control over business operations and stakeholders (Weinstein, 2020). However, they also often train their employees and designers to meet customer expectations. | Tesco valued its employees, suppliers, and customers (Keiningham et. al. 2020). For employees, they provide structured training, learning, and development opportunities to improve their customer handling competencies. |
| Customer-centric Operations | Apple has a limited customer group but they are loyal to the brand and prefer to use all products from the Apple brand (De Keyser et. al. 2020). The reason behind loyal customers is the best quality and value for money through services and excellent experience. | Zara offers the latest fashionable products to their customer and they also customised their products for customer satisfaction (Bauer, 2021). The company converts the design into final products in just 15 days to constantly meet customer demand. | Tesco offers a wide range of products including groceries, home appliances, personal care, and so on. The company provides home delivery services and after-sales services which exhibit its customer-centric operations. |
| Customer relations | Apple is not using attractive marketing tactics as they know their customer base and they connect with them in a very simple manner. The company offers 24*7 customer care options and is open to listen to their queries and solve quickly (Breuer et. al. 2020). Moreover, amazing features of their product make unsaid but strong relations with customers. | Zara’s customer relations are very strong and they often connect with them through social media sites and email. | Tesco offers high quality items and services along with after-sales services to maintain their existing customers and attract new customers (Majava and Isoherranen, 2019). They used different marketing channels to maintain positive relations with customers. |
| Pricing strategy | Apple’s products are very costly across the industry but their offerings are justifying their prices and customers are willing to pay high to experience the best quality products and services. | Zara’s product prices are comparatively high to other fast fashion companies (Dhiman, 2019). However, the quality of products is also very high which justifies their prices. | Tesco charges a low price for their product which is the customer retention strategy and competitive advantage of the company. |
Conclusion
The present report concluded that Apple MacBook provides an immense experience to their users and thus the company gets competitive advantages. Therefore, the company mainly focuses on customer experience rather than increasing its customer base as they have a limited but loyal customer group. The report analyses Apple’s customer experience journey discusses omnichannel marketing, and CX performance metrics, and compares the success factor of the company with other companies from different industries.
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