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Full Length
Research Paper
Customers: Identifying the needs in higher education
Akinyele Samuel Taiwo
Department of Business Studies, Covenant University, Ota,
Nigeria.
Email:
akinsamolu2000@yahoo.com
Received 06 April, 2010; Accepted August 03, 2010
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.
Keywords: Customer-driven, higher education,
students, quality, faculty, academic, organisation,
Universities |