LIN, Chieh-Yu & CHENG, Tzai-Fu
Chang Jung Christian University, Kway Jen, Tainan, Taiwan 711, Republic of China, jylin@mail.cju.edu.tw
Abstract: It is well known that the objective of the engineering education is to train students being able to design, fabricate and analyze engineering problems. It is also important for engineering education to meet the needs of industries. Moreover, in order to keep pace with the fast changes of real world, the engineering education program should satisfy above requirements. This study will investigate the planning of engineering education through the customer service concept. Customer is defined as anyone who is imapcted by a product or process. The customer receives inputs of information and/or physical goods. In an engineering education system, students receive technical and engineering information via learning in school, and industries receive students with engineering training. Both the students and industries are customers of an engineering education system. This study illustrates a systematic process in engineering education planning. To achieve the superior quality for engineering education requires the understanding of customers' needs in depth and then translating these needs into curricula or programs of engineering education. The framework for planning an engineering education system introduced in this study is (1) establishing engineering education goals, (2) identifying the customers, (3) discovering customers' needs by marketing research, (4) developing product features, and (5) establishing process controls and feedback systems.
Keywords: customer, service, education, planning, quality
It is well known that engineering education and a high-technology society are closely related, and an intensive interaction between education and technology would come up to a wealthy society and a peaceful world. The cooperation among the government, industry, and school should be linked tightly together to promote the technology level and students' abilities. In order to keep in pace with the fast changing world, the engineering education needs frequently reviewed, and urges schools to make necessary improvement or reform on the educational programs. In an engineering education system, students receive technical and engineering skills and information through learning in school, and societies or industries receive students with engineering training. According to the customer service concept, both students and societies (or industries) are customers of an engineering education system. Actually, some authors[1] commented that students play both roles, "customer" and "raw material," in an engineering education system. In the view of "raw material," the students are the elements under transformation during the educational process, and the customer is society as a whole. However, in this study, we consider the student as the customer in an engineering education system. Students may be transformed into professional engineers in an engineering process, like the raw materials being transformed into products, but students are human beings. They can think and may react to improper educational process, like customers complain about poor-quality products. Thus, this study will consider students as customers.
The main theme in customer service concept is customer satisfaction. A Japanese professor, Noriaki Kano[2], suggested three classes of customer requirements:
(1) dissatisfiers: requirements that are expected in a product or service. These features are generally not stated by customers but assumed as given, but if they are not present, the customer is dissatisfied.
(2) satisfiers: requirements that customer say they want. Although these requirements are generally not expected, fulfilling them creates satisfaction.
(3) exciters/delighters: new or innovative features that customers do not expect. The presence of unexpected features leads to high perceptions of quality.
Meeting customer expectations (that is, providing satisfiers) is often considered the minimum required to stay in business. To be truly competitive, companies must surprise and delight customers by going beyond the expected. As customers become familiar with them, exciters/delighters become satisfiers over time. Eventually, satisfiers become dissatisfiers. Successful companies continually innovate and study customer perceptions to ensure that needs are being met. Although schools are noprofit organizations, schools need to learn business skills. In Taiwan, with the slow increase in populations and the fast increase in the numbers of schools, many schools face a serious problem - how to survive in the competitive environment. The quality of university teaching depends, first of all, on the curriculum, which must be designed to meet the students’ future needs as a self-employed professional or as a private or public sector employee, as well as the need to keep pace with change. The objective of this study is how to apply the customer service concept to plan and design an engineering education system.
In customer service concept, how to meet customer satisfaction is the main goal. Within a quality-conscious engineering education system, both the planning of products and the planning of the production or service focus on fulfilling the needs and expectations of customers. To achieve customer satisfaction, the system identifies customers' needs, designs the production and service systems to meet those needs, and measures the results as the basis or improvement. In this study, we define a customer as anyone who is impacted by the engineering education system. Two categories of customers then emerge:
(1) External customers: The industries or societies which receive the students that are the results produced by the engineering system.
(2) Internal customers: The students which receive engineering skills or information from the engineering education system. Actually, teachers could be seen as internal customers respect to the students. They sometimes receive some information from the students or industries, and accordingly, modify their teaching skills.
Any organizations, including schools, have four key goals:
(1) to satisfy their customers
(2) to achieve higher customer satisfaction than their competitors
(3) to retain customers in the long run
(4) to gain market share
To achieve these goals, an organization must deliver ever-improving value to its customers. Customer satisfaction occurs when products and services meet or exceed customer expectations (i.e., quality). Focusing on customers is not just a quality issue; it is sound business practice. Customer satisfaction translates directly into increased schools’ reputation or profits. Poor quality products and services, on the other hand, lead to customer dissatisfaction in the form of complaints, returns, and unfavorable word-of-mouth publicity. Some studies have shown that dissatisfied customers tell at least twice as many friends about bad experiences than they tell about good ones.
In engineering education systems, the engineering information and skills are products for students, and students are products for the industries. Customer satisfaction results from providing goods and services that meet or exceed customers' needs. True customer needs and expectations are called expected quality. Expected quality is what the customer assumes will be received from the product. The producer identifies these needs and expectations and translates them into specifications for products and services. Actual quality is the outcome of the production process and what is delivered to the customer. Actual quality may differ considerably from expected quality. This difference happens when information gets lost or is misinterpreted from one step to the next. For instance, ineffective students’ opinion research efforts may incorrectly assess the true customer needs and expectations. Designers of curricula or programs may develop specifications that inadequately reflect these needs. A further complication comes from the customer who sees and believes the quality of the product (perceived quality) as considerably different from what he or she actually receives (actual quality). Because perceived quality drives consumer behavior, this area is where producers should really center their concerns. These different levels of quality can be summarized by a fundamental equation:
Perceived quality = Actual quality - Expected quality
Any differences between the expected quality and actual quality can cause either unexpected satisfaction (actual quality is higher than expected quality) or dissatisfaction (actual quality is lower than expected quality). Understanding these relationships requires a system of customer satisfaction measurement and the ability to use customer feedback for improvement. This model suggests that engineering education systems must take great care to ensure that customer needs are met or exceeded.
Recently, we have seen many essays about succesful businesses and organizations. It can be found that these successful organizations engage in a variety of customer-oriented practices. These generic practices are:
(1) They understand both near-term and longer-term customer needs and expectations (the voice of the customer) and employ systematic processes for gathering customer needs and managing the information. Four basic approaches for identifying customer needs and monitoring satisfaction: (a) primary research, which includes focus groups, surveys, and interviews; (b) secondary research from monitoring competitors; (c) customer performance tracking that studies consumer behavior; and (d) customer feedback from sales representatives.
(2) They understand the linkages between the voice of the customer and design and production processes. This practice ensures that no critical requirements fall through the cracks, and minimizes the potential gaps between expected quality and actual quality.
(3) They make commitments to customers that promote trust and confidence in their products and services.
(4) They have effective customer relationship management processes by which customers can easily seek assistance, comment, complain, and receive prompt resolution of their concerns.
(5) They measure customer satisfaction, compare the results relative competitors, and use the information to evaluate and improve internal processes.
According to the customer service concept, this study will introduce the customer-driven design processes to design and plan the engineering education system. The planning road map includes five steps: (1) establish engineering education goals and objectives, (2) identify those impacted (i.e., the customers), (3) discover customers' needs, (4) develop product features, and (5) establish process controls and feedback systems.
Course contents are developed to satisfy educational goals and objectives. Without knowing objectives beforehand, it would not be releastic to consider what need to be taught and how to deliver. Lan[3] presented six objectives of engineering education:
(1) technical competence: To develop the course work, courseware planning and course contents, in theoretical, numerical and experimental techniques for the students capacitate for identifying, formulating, and solving engineering or real world problems. This also means that the relevance of course work to the real world problems should be maintained
(2) team work and leadership: Graduates must demonstrate an ability to function on multidisciplinary teams, to develop leadership skills, and to accept and support team decisions.
(3) professional and ethical responsibility: The graduates should know to develop products such that these products not only will improve people's lives but also are safe.
(4) communication: Homework and reports should be prepared professionally. Oral presentation to express and to exchange ideas can also be required.
(5) broad education: Graduates must demonstrate the broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions, the knowledge of contemporary issues, and the ability to work effectively with customers in an international marketplace.
(6) life-long learning: Engineering, sometimes, is a high technology and a dynamic profession, so that engineers must learn how to engage a life-long learning.
With the objectives of engineering education shown above, and the needs for graduating modern engineers to work in the 21st Century, an guide to design and plan the engineering education system is introduced.
To understand customer needs, an organization must know who its customer are. The easiest way to identify customers is to think in terms of customer-supplier relationships. Every process receives inputs from suppliers and creates outputs for customers. The feedback loops suggest that suppliers, such as teachers, must also be considered as customers. They need appropriate information about the requirements they must meet. Identifying customers begins with asking some fundamentals questions:
(1) What products or services are produced? Curricula? Programs? Students?
(2) Who uses these products and services? Students? Industries?
(3) Who supplies the inputs to the process?
As individuals, departments, and functions develop their customer-supplier models, natural linkages become evident. These linkages build up the "chain of customers" throughout the engineering education system that connect every individual and function to the external customers and consumers. Eventually, everyone can better understand their role in satisfying not only their internal customers, but also the external customers. Customers generally have different requirements and expectations. We usually cannot satisfy all customers with the same products or services. Therefore, in order to respond to customers' needs, it would be better to segment customers into natural groups and customize the products or services. Juran [4] suggests classifying customers into two main groups: the vital few and the useful many.
In planning to collect information on customer needs, we must go beyond the search for obvious needs to the more subtle ones that present opportunities for innovative new-product designs. First, let us focus on the distinction between stated needs and real needs. It will be useful to identify three levels of customer expectation. At level I, a customer assumes that a basic need will be met; at level II, the customer will be satisfied; at level III, the customer will be delighted with the service. Customer needs may be clear or they may be disguised; they may be rational or less than rational. To create customers, those needs must be discovered and served.
These needs are detailed by conducting extensive marketing research and obtaining the input of technical experts. The needs have to be translated from the customer's language to "education language". As mentioned above, there are many kinds of customers, all of which are difficult to satisfy simultaneously. Engineering education systems need to focus on the key drivers of customer satisfaction that lead to success. Considerable marketing efforts go into correctly identifying customer needs. According to our research, there are five key dimensions of education quality contribute to customer perceptions:
(1) reliability: the ability to provide what was promised, dependably and accurately.
(2) assurance: the knowledge and courtesy of teachers or staffs, and their ability to convey trust and confidence.
(3) tangibles: the physical facilities and equipment.
(4) empathy: the degree of caring and individual attention provided to customers
(5) responsiveness: the willingness to help customers and provide prompt service.
This step made use of the marketing research to provide curricula or program designers with detailed guidelines for several product features that were important to achieving high product quality. These guidelines then became the basis of specific design projects.
As curricula or programs are exercised, the coordination among all functions continued and resulted in final refinements to the product design. There are two major themes in this process:
(1) Measuring Customer Satisfaction
Customer feedback is vital to an engineering education system . Through feedback, a system learns how satisfied its customers are with its products and services and sometimes about competitors' products and services. Measures of customer satisfaction allow the education system to
(a) discover customer perceptions of how well the system is doing in meeting customer needs,
(b) compare the performance relative to competitors,
(c) discover areas for improvement,
(d) track trends to determine if changes actually result in improvements.
An effective customer satisfaction measurement system results in reliable information about customer ratings of specific product and service features and about the relationship between these ratings and customer's likely future market behavior. The first step in developing a customer satisfaction survey is to determine its purpose. Surveys should be designed to clearly provide the users of the survey results with the information they need to make decisions. The next question to address is who should conduct the survey. Independent third-party organizations often have more credibility to respondents and can ensure objectivity in the results. The next step is to select the appropriate survey instrument. Formal written surveys are the most common means of measuring customer satisfaction, although other techniques, such as face-to-face interviews, telephone interviews, and focus groups are used, which will be discussed in the following section. Written surveys have the advantage of low data collection costs, self-administration, and ease of analysis. In addition, they can probe deeply into the issues. However, they suffer from high nonresponse bias, require large sample sizes, and measure predetermined perceptions of what is important to customers, thus reducing the scope of qualitative information that can be obtained. The types of questions to ask must be properly worded to achieve actionable results. By actionable, we mean that responses are tied directly to key education objectives, so that what needs to be improved is clear; and responses are translated into cost/revenue (or reputation) implications to support the setting of improvement priorities. One should avoid leading questions, acronyms and jargon that the respondent may not understand, and double negatives. Most customer satisfaction measures evaluate service characteristics. Developing measurable service quality characteristics can be difficult. Typically, such quality characteristics are translated into specific statements that clearly describe the concept. A “ Likert” scale can be used to measure the response. Responses in the “ 5” range tell the education system what it is doing very well. Responses in the “ 4” range suggest that customer expectations are being met, but that the system may be vulnerable to competitors. Responses in the “ 3” range mean that the product or service barely meets customer expectations and that much room for improvement exists. Responses in the “ 1” or “ 2” range indicate serious problems.
(2) Effective Complaint Management
Despite all efforts to satisfy customers, every education system experiences unhappy customers. Complaints can adversely affect system performance if not dealt with effectively. According to our study, the average school never hears from 96 percent of its unhappy customers. For every complaint received, the school has 26 more customers with problems, six of whose problems are serious. The average customer who has had a problem will tell nine to ten others about it. Customers who have had complaints resolved satisfactorily will only tell about five others of the problem resolution.
In business, of the customers who make a complaint, more than half will again do business with that company if their complaint is resolved. If the customer feels that the complaint was resolved quickly, the figure jumps to 95 percent. Effective resolution of complaints increase customer loyalty and retention. Many customers do not complain because they feel it wouldn't do any good or they are uncomfortable with the process. A successful engineering education system should make it easy for customers, both students and industries, to complain. Complaints provide a source of product and process improvement ideas. To improve products and processes effectively, we must do more than simply fix the immediate problem. A systematic process is needed for collecting and analyzing complaint data and then using that information for improvements. Typically curriculum teams study the information, determine the real source of the complaints, and make recommendations. In addition, the complaint process itself needs to be monitored, evaluated, and improved. Engineering education systems should track the percentage of customers who satisfied with complaints resolution, the cost of resolving complaints, and the time required to resolve them.
As mentioned above, the marketing research is important for identifying customers' needs and measuring customer satisfaction. In the broad sense, marketing research is the activity of studying those aspects of quality which influence or are influenced by the forces in the marketplace. In that sense, activities such as field complaint analysis or study of government research publications are a form of market research. In a narrow sense, marketing research involves exploring the unknown and creating data where none existed before. In the discussion that follows, the term "marketing research" will be used in its narrower sense. Gryna[5] illustrates marketing research techniques as applied to quality. The broad purposes of marketing research in quality are mainly to:
(1) discover alarming situations for which existing alarm signals are silent
(2) discover opportunities not disclosed by present information sources
(3) test existing unsupported and even axiomatic beliefs
More specifically, marketing research in quality looks for answers to some cardinal questions:
(1) What is the relative importance of various product qualities as seen by the user? The answers provided by marketing research are typically different from the priori beliefs of the education system designers. Sometimes the difference is dramatic.
(2) For the more important qualities, how does our product compare with competitors' products, as seen by users?
(3) What is the effect of these competing qualities (including our own) on customers' bnefits, costs, and well-being?
(4) What are users' problems about which they do not complain but which we might nevertheless be able to remedy?
(5) What ideas do customers have that we might be able to utilize for their benefit?
Customer requirements, as expressed in the customer's own terms, are called the voice of the customer. However, the customer's meaning is the crucial part of the message. A variety of methods, or "listening posts," can be used to collect information about customer needs and expectations, their importance, and customer satisfaction with the education system performance on these measures. This study suggests some of the key approaches to gathering customer information.
(1) comment cards and formal surveys: Comment cards and formal surveys are easy ways to solicit customer information. These approaches typically concentrate on measuring customer satisfaction. However, they often include questions pertaining to customers' perception of the importance of particular quality dimensions as well as open-ended questions. Formal surveys can be designed to scientifically sample a customer base, but usually only a small proportion of customers respond. However, we find that they work well. Formal surveys must be designed carefully to ensure that the right information is acquired, and that unclear questions, biased questions, and excessively long questionnaires are not used.
(2) focus group: A focus group is a panel of individuals (customers or noncustomers) who answer questions about an education system's products (i.e., curricula, programs, or students) and services as well as those of competitors. This interview approach allows us to carefully select the composition of the panel and probe panel members about important issues, such as comparing experiences with expectations, in depth. Key questions that we can ask include: What do you like about the product or service? What pleases or delights you? What do you dislike? What problems have you encountered? If you had the ability, how would you change the product or service? Although customers generally like to fill out surveys and comment cards, by doing so they are simply responding to the perspective of the people who designed the survey. Focus groups offer a substantial advantage by providing the direct voice of the customer to the engineering education system. A disadvantage of focus groups is their higher cost of implementation compared to other approaches.
(3) direct customer contact: Hearing issues and complaints firsthand is often an eye-opening experience. Teachers may spend two to three hours per week to interface with customers directly. Any teacher who comes in direct contact with customers (including students and industries) can obtain useful information simply by engaging in conversation and listening to customers. The effectiveness of this method depends upon a culture that encourages open communications.
(4) study complaints: Complaints, although undesirable from a service point of view, can be a key source of customer information. Complaints allow an organization to learn about product failures and service problems, particularly the gaps between expectations and performance. Studies indicate that approximately one out of twenty five customers complaint. Thus, to take full advantage of complaints, superior engineering education systems must make it easy for customers to complain.
(5) monitor the internet: In recent years, the growth of the internet is offering a fertile arena for finding out what consumers think of their products. Internet users frequently seek advice from other users on strengths and weaknesses of products, share experiences on service quality, or pose specific problems they need to resolve. By monitoring the conversations on discussion groups or bulletin board system (BBS), system managers can obtain valuable insights on customer perceptions and product or service quality problems. In open forums, customer comments can often be translated into creative product improvements. In addition, the internet can be a good source of information about competitors' products. The cost of monitoring internet conversations is minimal compared to the costs of other types of survey approaches, and customers are not biased by any questions that may be asked. However, the conversations may be considerably less-structured and unfocused, and thus may contain less usable information. Also, unlike a focus group or direct interview, inaccurate perceptions or factual errors cannot be corrected.
There are several tools for classifying customer information. This study suggests affinity diagrams and tree diagrams. The affinity diagram - a main ingredient of the KJ method, developed in the 1960s by Kawakita Jiro, a Japanese anthropologist - is a technique for gathering and organizing a large number of ideas or facts. Its purpose is to allow teams to sift through large volumes of information efficiently and identify natural patterns or groupings in the information. With an affinity diagram, managers can more easily focus on the key issues and their elements rather than an unorganized collection of information. A tree diagram shows a hierarchical structure of facts and ideas. It is similar to an affinity diagram in that it categorizes concepts into natural groups. Both affinity and tree diagrams can be used to organize customer requirements into logical categories, particularly after a variety of input is captured from interviews, internet, and so on.
In the competitive world, all organizations (including schools) aspire to have a unique competitive advantage. Such an advantage can be achieved by ability to meet customer needs on short notice, and by quality. By identifying customers, analyzing their needs, and understanding our quality status relative to competition, we can establish education quality goals that will lead to a competitive advantage. This study introduces systematic processes to design and plan engineering education sysyems through the customer service concept.