Customers: Identifying the Needs in Higher Education
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Many institutions of higher education are hesitant to consider themselves as customer-driven entities.
It is common to view the student as the customer but this notion is not universally accepted. This paper
reviews the debate in the education and marketing literature about students as customers and reveals
the difficulty in using the word customer to describe the student/university relationship. The author
argues that the debate must move away from identifying the customer and focus on the university as a
service provider. An emerging perspective on market orientation suggest that strategic insights may be
gained when firms take into account their customers’ view on the organization’s level of market
orientation. Even the suggestion of the term customer can arouse many emotions, preconceptions, and
misconceptions. The idea that students are partners in developing and delivering quality education
threatens the historic, traditional academic role of faculty as purveyor of knowledge. Nevertheless, one
fact has been proven over and over again. Customer-driven organizations are effective because they
are fully committed to satisfying and anticipating customer needs. The future success of colleges and
universities will increasingly be determined by how they identify and satisfy their various customers.
This paper accentuates the subject by initially reviewing a number of theoretical viewpoints as to why a
customer perspective should be sought when assessing organizational phenomena such as market
orientation. The findings showed that all the proposed relationship were significant. The result further
demonstrated that service quality acts as a partial mediator where customer satisfaction was not
derived completely by service quality. This paper eventually concludes by elaborating the various
conclusions derived from the study
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H Social Sciences (General)