INTRODUCTION

Customer satisfaction, a business term, is a measure of how products and services supplied by a
company meet or surpass customer expectation. It is seen as a key performance indicator within
business and is part of the four of a Balanced Scorecard.

In a competitive marketplace where businesses compete for customers, customer satisfaction is

seen as a key differentiator and increasingly has become a key element of business strategy.

However, the importance of customer satisfaction diminishes when a firm has increased bargaining
power. For example, cell phone plan providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, participate in an
industry that is an oligopoly, where only a few suppliers of a certain product or service exist. As
such, many cell phone plan contracts have a lot of fine print with provisions that they would never
get away if there were, say, a hundred cell phone plan providers, because customer satisfaction
would be way too low, and customers would easily have the option of leaving for a better contract
offer. There is a substantial body of empirical literature that establishes the benefits of customer
satisfaction for firms.

IFIM Business School

IFIM Business School, Bangalore (The Institute of Finance and International Management) founded
in 1995 with its first batch of students graduating in 1997, finds its place among the Top 15 of the
500+ Business Schools that were started post 1990 in the private sector.

We have grown very fast in the last decade and today IFIM Business School has come to acquire a
unique ‘institutional equity’ with all its incumbent attributes excellent curriculum and faculty inputs,
infrastructure, international exposure, academia-industry interface and placements.

In recent times, IFIM Business School has taken many bold, forward looking and progressive
initiatives to include collaboration with leading academic, research and corporate bodies for
conducting continuing education programmes, research, corporate training & consultancy and
offering a PhD programme in management.

CAMPUS INFRASTRUCTURE
 The Campus is spread over 2 acres of land and the infrastructure consists of a computer lab, an
integrated Wi-Fi enabled campus, student activity areas such as a lounge and snack bar, 24
classrooms of varying seating capacities, three conference halls exclusively for Executive
Development Programmes, a centrally air-conditioned auditorium, an amphi-theatre, placement
office, Admissions office and an Administration department.

OBJECTIVE

To gain Customer Satisfaction (students) in IFIM Business School through removal of wastages in
the current processes followed by the various departments.

AS IN PROCESS

In the project four problem areas found in IFIM will be discussed:

 PLACEMENTS
Students have a certain expectation about the job profile, companies coming to the campus, salary
package and placed within a specific time period. When that does not happen students do not get
the satisfaction. There is a major communication gap with the placement cell and the management
as well as the students. During the exams most of the placements happen, not much coordination
is there. The salary packages also do not meet the student’s expectation.

 TRANSPORTATION
The college bus to hostel and back is in a very bad condition and the route which the bus takes
also does not help to improve or maintain the condition of the bus as the road condition is very
bad. The numbers of buses are also limited to three for 240 students.
 FOOD IN CAFETERIA AND HOSTEL
Students get to eat very bland and no nutritious food. There is rarely any variety for the students in
the week. The food is unhygienic and no proper care is taken in the preparation.

 ATTITUDE OF COLLEGE
The attitude of the people (staff and employees) is not very professional. They delay the allocation
of the assignments and towards the end term exams they expect us to give assignments.

These were some of the major problems facing the students when they join the college.

ADVANTAGES

 FACULTY
The faculty of the college in all the departments is good and very helpful when students need help.
Qualified guest lecturers also come and teach which gives the student an in depth understanding of the
subject.

 INFRASTUCTURE
The IT lab, the library and the campus are all enabled with state of the art facilities like WI-FI,
projectors in every class room, spacious and AC rooms etc. the amphi theatre can easily hold 300
people, it also has a spacious stage for any important programme to be held or events like college
fests, pujas etc. the structure of the campus is very well designed which gives emphasis to esthetics,
space management and psychology of the students as well as faculty.

 SECURITY
The campus has two gates and security guards are present all around the campus and all-round the
clock.

 LOCATION
The college is placed very far from the main city. A new student may find it very difficult to locate the
college in the city. Many lecturers also decline the offer to come and teach because of the distance.
 PERSONALITY DEVELOPMENT
IFIM Business School has constituted a Centre for Personality Development for its students. This is a
unique concept and goes beyond imparting soft skills training.

At the Centre, the students undergo training in the following aspects: Communication Skills (theory
and practices through language labs), Logical reasoning, quantitative techniques, table etiquettes,
personal grooming, interview skills, theatre workshops and many more such aspects.

 SPORTS & WELLNESS

IFIM in line with the Get Ahead Doctrine is investing into building competence for imparting
education on wellness and personality. The faculty of IFIM believes that a good body and a sound
personality can provide our students with that cutting edge which is required to "Get Ahead". Thus the
faculty of IFIM is keen on making participation in wellness activities as compulsory for all our
students under the aegis of a trained fitness professional.

DATA

Measuring customer satisfaction

Organizations need to retain existing customers while targeting non-customers. Measuring

customer satisfaction provides an indication of how successful the organization is at providing
products and/or services to the marketplace.

Customer satisfaction is an abstract concept and the actual manifestation of the state of satisfaction
will vary from person to person and product/service to product/service. The state of satisfaction
depends on a number of both psychological and physical variables which correlate with
satisfaction behaviors such as return and recommend rate. The level of satisfaction can also vary
depending on other factors the customer, such as other products against which the customer can
compare the organization's products.
Work done by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry (Leonard L) between 1985 and 1988 delivered
SERVQUAL which provides the basis for the measurement of customer satisfaction with a service
by using the gap between the customer's expectation of performance and their perceived
experience of performance. This provides the researcher with a satisfaction "gap" which is semi-
quantitative in nature. Cronin and Taylor extended the disconfirmation theory by combining the
"gap" described by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry as two different measures (perception and
expectation) into a single measurement of performance relative to expectation.

The usual measures of customer satisfaction involve a survey with a set of statements using a
Likert Technique or scale. The customer is asked to evaluate each statement in terms of their
perception and expectation of performance of the service being measured.

METHODOLOGIES

American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) is a scientific standard of customer satisfaction.

Academic research has shown that the national ACSI score is a strong predictor of Gross Domestic
Product (GDP) growth, and an even stronger predictor of Personal Consumption Expenditure
(PCE) growth. On the microeconomic level, research has shown that ACSI data predicts stock
market performance, both for market indices and for individually traded companies. Increasing
ACSI scores has been shown to predict loyalty, word-of-mouth recommendations, and purchase
behavior. The ACSI measures customer satisfaction annually for more than 200 companies in 43
industries and 10 economic sectors. In addition to quarterly reports, the ACSI methodology can be
applied to private sector companies and government agencies in order to improve loyalty and
purchase intent.

Two companies have been licensed to apply the methodology of the ACSI for both the private and
public sector: CFI Group, Inc. applies the methodology of the ACSI offline, and Foresee Results
applies the ACSI to websites and other online initiatives. ASCI scores have also been calculated by
independent researchers, for example, for the mobile phones sector, higher education, and
electronic mail.

The Kano model is a theory of product development and customer satisfaction developed in the
1980s by Professor Noriaki Kano that classifies customer preferences into five categories:
Attractive, One-Dimensional, Must-Be, Indifferent, Reverse. The Kano model offers some insight
into the product attributes which are perceived to be important to customers. Kano also produced a
methodology for mapping consumer responses to questionnaires onto his model.

SERVQUAL or RATER is a service-quality framework that has been incorporated into customer-
satisfaction surveys (e.g., the revised Norwegian Customer Satisfaction Barometer) to indicate the
gap between customer expectations and experience.

J.D. Power and Associates provides another measure of customer satisfaction, known for its top-
box approach and automotive industry rankings. J.D. Power and Associates' marketing research
consists primarily of consumer surveys and is publicly known for the value of its product awards.

Other research and consulting firms have customer satisfaction solutions as well. These include
A.T. Kearney's Customer Satisfaction Audit process, which incorporates the Stages of Excellence
framework and which helps define a company’s status against eight critically identified
dimensions.

For Business to Business (B2B) surveys there is the Info Quest box. This has been used
internationally since 1989 on more than 110,000 surveys (Nov '09) with an average response rate
of 72.74%. The box is targeted at "the most important" customers and avoids the need for a blanket
survey.

LEAN PROCESS

An integrated system of principles, practices, and techniques for operational excellence based on
empowering the front-line and driving relentless pursuit of perfect customer value creation.

The core idea is to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. Simply, lean means
creating more value for customers with fewer resources.

A lean organization understands customer value and focuses its key processes to continuously
increase it. The ultimate goal is to provide perfect value to the customer through a perfect value
creation process that has zero waste.
CHANGES SUGESSTED

As already discussed above about four problem areas in IFIM Business School, the suggestions to
those problems may be as follows,

 Placements: -
1. Need proper communication between all the departments functioning to minimize
the gap.
2. Raise the standard of companies for placement to meet the expectation of students.
3. Start the placement activity as prior as possible for better placement accuracy.
 Transportation: -
1. An in house transportation system can minimize the problem of bad condition of
transportation.
2. More number of buses can accommodate the student who stays in IFIM Hostel.
 Food in cafeteria and hostel: -
1. A student council should appoint for monitoring of the food in hostel as well as in
cafeteria in weekly basis.
2. Frequent change in menu as per majority of student’s request.
3. Take care of hygienic and nutritious food.
 Attitude of college: -
1. A monthly assessment of the staff and employees to improve the service provide by
them.
2. Proper training towards professional behavior.
PROPOSED LEAN PROCESS

CONCLUSION
The infrastructure consists of a computer lab, an integrated WiFi enabled campus, student activity
areas such as a lounge and snack bar, 24 classrooms of varying seating capacities, three conference
halls exclusively for Executive Development Programmes, a centrally air-conditioned auditorium,
an amphi-theatre, Placement office, Admissions office and an Administration department. Having
all the facilities out there in campus there have some wastes which may need minor adjustment or
discussion of root cause.