Free Real-World Project Management Essay Sample

Los Angeles is one amongst the few places in the USA where businesses are created to reflect on the tastes and preferences of the people living around there. The population of Los Angeles is one of the most diverse in terms of culture and several other aspects of life. However, inspite of all this, the people have a similarity when it come to shopping and seeking services. The general mood of Los Angeles sets the ground of doing business and so does it to shopping. As a Los Angeles customer, it is not the amount of revenue that a delivery service company acquires annually that would make me opt to choose them. As they say, the small things matter most and securing these so called things seem to be the least of companies’ worries many of the times. As a result of this, many investors do not undertake research to focus on what the customers want before implementing some of their own. When it comes to service, a delivery company would expect that delivering in time and in good shape would be all they need to convince their customers. Given the uniformity of shopping with the residents of Los Angeles, time is of essence as is delivery of the products in good shape.

Los Angeles being as non-dynamic as it is in terms of shopping, it is still very sensitive when it comes to the delivery of service. Customers in Los Angeles are not bothered by gaps between them and the companies that provide the delivery services. However, when they notice the occurrence nearing, they choose to abandon the current service provider with a clear mind to opt to use the services of the next seemingly reliable service provider. For a delivery company to succeed in Los Angeles, customer behavior research is necessary in order to give what is needed and take away what isn’t. For this reason; customer’s time, resources, respect, and satisfaction are some of the elements that influence their behavior and which are supposed to be researched on carefully.

OBJECTIVES

After conducting this research, an investor willing to start a delivery service in Los Angeles would:

Be able to understand what is needed by the customers and what is not

Be in a positions to invest on the areas that affect the customers mostly

Be able to understand the demographical effect on customers’ behaviors

Be able to keep self assessment appraisal prognosis

Be able in a better position to invest elsewhere by considering customers as a business product to research on.

Background History

Delivering is a service that plays double standards when it comes to quality and time sensitive customers. The reason for this without considering time and quality is because of the fact that besides the services and the act of delivering there is the element of considering the shape and the quality of products delivered. In this case, many companies have chosen to conduct research before they can launch themselves in the business of delivering. This research followed after a number of losses in terms of operational cost compared to profits and other interest that come with quality service. Loss starts with the primary sources of livelihood and then gets to the point of loosing assets and monetary strength. The primary source of livelihood for any business is the customer and when one customer feels like he/she is not considered and element of existence of the business, he/she moves along to the next service provider and takes with him/her several others. To avoid this situation, research is necessary for the survival of the business. The significance of the study is to find ways that help the business connect with the customers at a personal level.

Wing studied the business trends and the role of businessmen in making their businesses unsuccessful. He argued that in his study, he discovered that the service delivery services engaged the customers on telephony talks and order were mostly placed using the same method. On the other hand, management and customer care departments were busy ensuring that the quality and of the products ordered was good and that time for delivery was observed. Wing observed that this delivery companies took their time to finalize and make sure that the customer would be impressed with the quality of the products. However, one major mistake that these delivery services made was focusing too much on the details of the product and the time. They forgot to take their time to train their employees (runners) on how to respect the customer and the products they delivering to these customers.

The behavior of the customers was observed to be made up of imbalanced attitudes. The imbalanced attitude was as a result of bad experience that customers had before. It was also noted that the customers behaved in a manner that was meant to make it clear who was paying. With this, Wing discovered that customers would behave in a manner that is inconsiderate of the service provider. They would demand for better inspite of the fact that the service provider may have given the best shot to provide what he/she managed to provide. The above situation is a thing that the sellers, services providers, and even the runners cannot address by confronting the customers. It is can only be addressed by looking into the problem and investing more to curb it before rivals take advantage of the diverting market.

LITERATURE REVIEW

Customer tastes and preferences

There are different types of customers and the difference is brought by the fact that most customers would like to use their financial strengths to get the best of services and products. The different customers include those who choose services and products based on their prices, those who assess the products and services due to the fact that there are incentives and bonuses that come along with it, and lastly there are those who wouldn’t mind what they get. For the same of these customers, a delivery service company can operate well if all the customers were of the third type. However, the fact that there would be customers willing to part with their money without considering the quality of the services means that they are highly misinformed. With the changing times and more agencies seizing the opportunities and conducting service and product research on behalf of the customers, it is hard for an investor to make it in business by assuming that his customers would be uninformed.

The three types of customers differ from each other in terms of tastes and preferences. The tastes of one customer are not the same as those of the other. The same thing applies in services delivery field. If the customer is to choose, there would be more cost incurred in trying to satisfy the tastes and preferences of each individual customer. However, as diverse as the customer come, the service should be flexible enough to fit some tastes and preferences that are generally more demanding and reflecting a larger portion of the market.

Analytically addressing this issue, tastes and preferences are considered by more than 75% of customers who hire, buy, rent, or even acquire products and services by credit. Speaking within the shoes of a customer, it is not how general a service is considered but rather how much the individual customer is willing to pay more to get what they want. May people and customers have the notion that cheap things are of low quality and less durable. When the products and services are expensive, the customer tend to raise their hopes way too high that I the long-run, they end up a disappointed lot. For this case depending on earlier experience, a customer is likely to consider a fairly priced service to be of less quality long before it is even delivered t him/her.

The situation is even worse when this delivery service is involved with restaurants and food stuffs. Depending on earlier experience and current expectation, chances are that the customers will not be satisfied with one of the following: timing, attitude of the service patron, utensils used, price of the product, and probably a certain preparation method. At this level, the tastes and preferences cease being general or even part of the business deal to being up close and personal. With failure to deliver service to the customer as s/he expects it within the timeframe specified, chances are that all resources used could be burdened to the service provider when the customer declines to carter for the cost.

Customer Attitude

Analysts have shown that the customer is one of the most importance entities within any business setting. As a matter of fact, it has been proven by research that by the time any person enters that early adulthood age of 19 years he/she is likely to have been involved in several business like activities. The activities could be doing trade with an ally, running family business, selling personal amenities, and/or buying a product or paying for a service. All these are situation each one of us has engaged him/herself in and they are there to remind us of personal levels of doing business. As the analysts argue, we need to be in control when doing business. Be it buying or selling, we all need to own the larger portion of the benefits that are associated with doing business. For this reason, if everyone could recall a business deal he/she was involved in, it is clear that we have all allowed attitude to come to play. On the same basis, customer behavior is assessed in the same way and analyzing it may require one to be age, time, and location sensitive about the matter.

The reason why age, time, and location are important when dealing or trying to understand the customer is due to the difference in notion and understanding levels. Customers of younger age are likely to ignore details on service provided. This is because they are flexible enough and can supplement the missing details by ignoring them or tending to them. Another reason why the young age customers may ignore details or may not rate service as quality or otherwise would be due to the fact that many of young people do not put value to the amount of money they haven’t worked for. The fact that most of young people are given money by their guardians makes them unable to place value of their money when demanding or seeking quality service.

The location where any investor intends to put up his/her business depends on several aspects. Among the aspects of living that comprise of culture, beliefs, norms, and personal responsibility is demography. Demography is the human distribution across a certain area of land. With demographical values playing a role during investment, they also play a big role when determining the shopping culture of the people. The attitudes of customers are accrued through the demographical values of culture, norms, way of life and beliefs. Considering that Los Angeles is most an urban setting and the people that are likely to use the delivery service are those living within the core of the urban setting (Windham 88). The demographical values of such people would include mostly take value for money, expectation of quality services, time sensitivity, and minding one’s own business as the way of living. Given that the population of Los Angeles is quite big, it is expected that cultures may be diverse. For this reason, the behavior of the people cannot be assessed through conducting study that would consider each and every person individually. In applying models that determine and predict the behavior of customers in such diverse populations, it is found that the behavior of the customers reflects their demographical setting while their attitudes would be reflected by the personal choices they make concerning tastes and preferences.

Time

The behavior of nay customer in any setting is most of the times influenced by the activities that the individual engages in on daily basis. As a matter of fact, time is recourse when applied in business operations and activities that can be considered to be of economic value. Sometimes people get bored and engage in less beneficial activities in order to pass time. Dealing with customers who value their time, delays of any nature could be damaging to the customer relations with the service provider.

Quality of service

The behavior of customers towards service delivery personnel, companies and agencies relies on how much details are included to make up the quality of the product and the service package. Quality of service is not the behavior but rather a determinant of the behavior. The customers are likely to lean more on the side where quality is considered a factor of marketing and an entity of persuasion. It is observed through other research that customers who question about quality have a former experience that involved deceiving. Deceiving could be in form of adverts that do not reflect the real life situation in terms service quality and guarantee of delivery within the specified timeframe.

Recall of former bad experiences

The customer base is made up of choices that involve bad decision making that result from both informed and uninformed choices. As a result, the failures of people to make proper decisions may or may not be reflecting on their level of ignorance to information regarding and connected to the services and products that they seek to purchase. With reflection to bad business deals that they have gone through, customer confidence is majorly damaged and many a times they tend to assume the same would happen to them with new service and product sales people.

Pay for the desired service

The behavioral aspect that the customers tend to assume during the times of making deals is most of the time dependent on the fact of who pays for the services and products. Many are times when the customer feels like he/she is the payer of the services and in return he expects the service provider to provide services that reflect the amount charged for the services. With this, the customer is not expected to be considerate of the issues that the service provider may be going through to deliver the services expected of him/her.

Availability of competition

The availability of competition amongst many operators gives the customers an upper hand to make choices that the operators may not have control over. In this case, the customer has the advantage to choose from the many operators that offer the same services or sell the same goods. In the event that the services of one provider are of lesser quality, makes the task of choosing a next provider or vendor the duty of the customer. With companies, agencies, and vendors competing against one another, the customer has the power to choose the service provider that he/she has confidence in.

Conclusion

In spite of the efforts that an investor or a service provider has put to the business that s/he runs, the customer gets to choose what s/he wants in the long-run. In terms of service provision, the service that one would consider to the best, someone else would term it as bad or missing in something. For this reason, research on culture and demographical values is considered a must have in order to control the losses that are associated with venturing to business without clear understanding of the market.

 

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