Ten UTS Business students are taking home a 3Gs iPhone, for their outstanding coursework in the area of customer service excellence. The phones were donated by Telstra, as a unique prize for undergraduate and postgraduate students studying services, marketing. The curriculum was developed by the UTS School of Marketing in collaboration with the Customer Service Institute of Australia (CSIA).
Speaking at the awards ceremony, Professor of Marketing, School of Marketing and Director, Centre for the Study of Choice, Professor Jordan Louviere said, ‘These sorts of things are important for the university and the students … that Telstra and the CSIA would make the awards available is more evidence of the fact that that people value these sorts of functions.’
Telstra and the CSIA congratulated UTS Business for its leading approach in teaching services marketing strategy.
Nathan Peters, Manager, Service Management, Telstra Enterprise and Government, said UTS is filling an important gap in business studies. ‘What the marketing department is delivering in terms of customer satisfaction and business-to-business relationship management is really important.’
He explained that business is built on customer relationships that need to be managed and nurtured.
Associate Lecturer for the School of Marketing, and coordinator and lecturer of the services marketing courses, Anouche Newman first invited the CSIA to present a guest lecture in her course in 2009. The relationship has flourished and now the CSIA is closely engaged in delivering course content and awarding students for high quality assignment outputs that are focusse don applying theory to practice.
‘The students love it because it’s industry coming into their course.’
Ms Newman said students often fail to see the connection between the theory they are taught and how to apply this in a work context. ‘The assignments we’ve developed enable them to do that.’
Executive Director of the CSIA, Brett Whitford said he had never seen so many ‘high brass’ members of faculty in one room together, as at the awards ceremony. ‘I think it’s a tribute to the University and how much they care about what (the students) have achieved.’ He said the undergraduate and post graduate courses are teaching ‘real world’ customer relationship management skills. Whitford said the course focus on retaining customers is very important because of the costs associated with acquiring new customers. ‘A retained customer is five times more profitable than a new customer, so if you can retain customers, it’s a really good business strategy.’
As an example of how costly poor customer service can be for business, he said the Australian telecommunications industry spent close to $50 million on ombudsman complaints in 2009.
‘I’m pretty happy that there’s a crop of students coming out that have the skills that can be used right away to improve service hopefully for everyone in Australia.’
Whitford congratulated the Business Faculty for being ‘motivated, practical and inclusive.’ He said international students ‘really shone in these projects,’ and UTS is doing ‘a great job’ in harnessing international expertise at the post graduate level.
MA in Business and Marketing students, Grace Barton, Rowena Jo, Robert Baker and Christine Chang, shared the top prize for their group project with Selina Chang, who is graduating with a MA in International Marketing.
They developed a customer charter for Virgin Active Gyms, a new and growing Sydney business. ‘Virgin active have a very special way of doing things and we were able to style the charter so it sounds like them. In the end, we thought we were them.’ Said Grace Barton. The winning undergraduate students were Thomas Grant, Jacinta Zhang, Caitlin Page, Angela Haghighat and Florence Lee for their group project on service recovery strategies. ‘We learnt a lot applying the theory and we found the work enjoyable as well.’ Angela Haghighat said.
The partnership between the School of Marketing and the CSIA continues to strengthen with plans afoot for the CSIA to sponsor a formal University prize next year.