Executive Summary
In order to introduce change, Metaverse should pay attention to technological changes and employees communication, organizational culture and value creation activities. For Metaverse change in relations with customers is important because it will help to improve image of the company and deliver quality service to diverse target audience. Since implementation is much more difficult than imagined, top managers must take personal ownership of value creation activities and technological change. Management is first and foremost concerned with creating, providing, and improving the new systems and communication patterns, not administering existing functional systems. Managerial leaders must be given ownership and held responsible for each decision impacting customer net value. These managers will be recognized as imposing trans-functionality on all organizational structural elements.
Introduction
Metaverse is an educational non-for-profit organization aimed to help people understand innovative technologies and science changes, explain opportunities and threats of new technologies and create am information literate society. The research and development (R&D) function is leading the way in exploiting the information revolution. Traditional, physical ways of working are being replaced by new methods of creating services — literally straight from the researcher’s mind. Out are going the physical methods of creating new services, to be replaced by a whole new science of -informatics. For Metaverse change in relations with customers is crucial because it will help to improve image of the company and facilitate involvement of customers, it will improve support and feedback services. The paper will describe and analyze the main ways to prepare organization to change in marketing customer relationships management. The paper will consist of an introduction, four chapters and conclusion.
Virtual Business Environment
Need for Change
The knowledge-based industries are beginning to harness and exploit information. By storing information globally and providing sophisticated search and access mechanisms, they can ensure that — as consultancies are proud to claim — ‘at the end of every day, every one of our consultants has access to all the knowledge of every other consultant’ (Langford, 2006). Channels to market, customer service, distribution and costs of manufacturing, the development of new services, the move to mass-customization — these can all be transformed by sharing information. Information is changing not only the processes by which companies design and manufacture, but also the services themselves (Wasson, 2004). Organisations at the leading edge of the information revolution are already exploiting the information associated with their services to enhance their offering to the consumer. Furthermore, because information can often be distributed for close to nothing, the additional costs of enhancing the product in this way can be minimal. Thus it is not only a company’s competitive edge that improves, but also its bottom line (Auger, 2005).
Each and every product or service has associated with it an ‘infosphere’ that contains all the information associated with the product or service. An apple, for example, has associated with it information about its size, weight, type, freshness, availability, source, method of growing, price and nutritional value, recipes it can be used in, stores that sell it and so on (Wasson, 2004). A piece of furniture has associated with it, for example, its size, color, suitability for various room designs, popularity and desirability, price, functionality, stockists, availability and safety features. Every product has at least 40 or 50 different pieces of information within its infosphere. The cost of the technology is not the main issue when making changes to Metaverse’s services. Most effort should be spent in ensuring that the right changes — those which will provide maximum benefit to the consumer — are introduced. Only then should the difficulty of implementation be considered (Silver, 2007).
In virtual organization like Metaverse the purpose of strategic change is to establish a base of knowledge and understanding about what users value. The strategy of the organization is to create and deliver the best net value for the user. Best net value is that which is realized by the customer of a product/service which justifies the sacrifice required while acquiring and using the product/service. The net value, therefore, results from combining that which is realized and sacrificed. Managerial leaders must attend to each of these dimensions of customer value. A value-based strategy inherently involves all systems and activities of the organization which contribute to the realizations provided and sacrifices required of the user. Some firms effectively maximize net value by producing new services with high customer realizations and low customer sacrifice (Silver, 2007).
Others inadvertently compromise net value either by producing services perceived to be of low realization and/or by requiring excessively high sacrifices of customers, or both. Managerial leaders must ensure that user value determination provides guidance to the management and continuous improvement of organizational systems for best net user value. Rather than treating these successive activities as independent and mutually distinct, they should be viewed as complementary and cumulative, with the investigatory activities flowing sequentially from one step to another. These activities are intended to be partially redundant (Ariss et al 2002). Execution of each successive cycle produces more sophisticated and refined understanding of what users value than exists at the preceding cycle. These activities are interrelated. Findings in earlier stages of investigation serve as foundations for later investigatory and analytical activities. Whatever the product, exploiting its information content can add value. In some cases, that exploitation can change the market completely, but the key to this exploitation is to understand why customers are using this service (Auger, 2005).
There is an irresistible trend towards the development of new methods of communicating with customers: banks and software houses are desperately working together to produce secure payment systems; multimedia companies are desperately working to deliver these services over new forms of communication such as interactive television, satellite television, telephone developments and a whole host of other technological combinations. Enlightened strategists are working within many producer organizations to work out new ways of adding value to the proposition (Grosse, 2002).
The difficulty with this approach is that Metaverse will not necessarily know what information will be of value to which individuals. Why should an owner of information about an organization’s customers know what information to pass to other members of the organization? Metaverse managers may well be interested in what customers want them to manufacture, marketing directors in what image will cause customers to purchase, finance directors in what customers will be prepared to pay. Each director might benefit from information about a customer, but, at the same time, it is not easy for any one of them to understand all the others’ requirements (Smith & Taylor, 2004). When most information was collected and kept in a physical form (usually paper), this lack of awareness about information in other parts of the business was not a significant handicap as there was very little that could be done with that information anyway. However, now that such information is available electronically, and can be sent at virtually no cost to anyone in the organization and then combined with other pieces of information to give insights into managerial decisions, this strategy of the ‘owner’ of the information deciding who will receive it becomes positively harmful (Grosse, 2002).
Virtual Strategy
Metaverse is now looking to ‘pull’ strategies to share knowledge, which work in the opposite way to the traditional ‘ownership’ strategy. Those individuals in an organization who want access to a piece of information ‘pull’ it to themselves. In the days of the physical storage of information, the only way in which this could be performed was for individuals to go to a repository of physical information — usually a library of some sort — and search through it until they found what they were looking for. Such a process used to take an enormous amount of time, however well organised the library might be and however good the skill of the librarians who administered it. The introduction of new communication patterns is rapidly changing the ways in which people can access such information. Five years ago, technology became widely available to enable people to search using keywords. True, the information still had to be indexed, but the searching of the indexes could be performed very quickly (Langford, 2006).
The rate of change in both the environment and technology has proven the traditional view to be ineffective. Metaverse managers must take on a systems view of the organization in better understanding how to invoke long-term change. They must recognize that the organization represents a transformation system that is comprised of a multitude of layers of subsystems that are interdependent and are put in place to provide what customers value (Stauss & Seidel, 2005). Managers are responsible for utilizing human, capital, technological, and raw material input resources effectively They must initialize the improvement effort by ensuring that an organizational system is in place to determine what customers most highly value. The current and future instability of the market in which those customers reside suggests that this accumulation of knowledge will not be a single event. The system must allow management to be aware of what is currently of value and what will be of value in order to proactively respond to changing needs. The rate of adaptation to changing value attributes will be the competitive differentiator. Managers must recognize how work actually gets done in the organization — through systems that cut horizontally across the entire organization. The effectiveness of these systems determines whether or not the organization is able to respond to changing customer values. Some of the systems are specifically directed at attributes highly valued by customers. Managers must focus their organization’s resources on studying, improving, and designing systems that are robust to changing customer needs. Preliminary activities and planning will provide insights that assist managers in focusing resources on those few critical systems that provide leverage in increasing the value of unique services for customers. It also offers recommendations for describing, assessing performance, standardizing, and improving those systems so that they will be adaptive to environmental change (Schwalbe, 2005).
Customer meeds Identification
Value Identification
Prior to guessing what users value, Metaverse must explicitly recognize users and perhaps logically group them into groups that completely represent the users. To effectively execute the activities of value determination Metaverse must know who the company’s users are. Thus, user and market definitions are critical precursors to value determination. Once users are identified, managers should have some current assumptions about what each of these users values. These assumptions may have a number of bases: past experience, current information, or logic. The company should assume the role of the user, and from that position indicate what the user values. In putting itself in the user’s place the company should adopt the user’s perspective. When guessing what the user values Metaverse must consider two factors: what it is that he or she receives and, coincidentally, what sacrifice is required to obtain that which is received. The users of most services have been led by Metaverse’s actions to expect certain value out of services. Metaverse may have suggested what the users of Metaverse’s services can expect via advertising, proposals, discussion, promises, promotions, and past performance of services. Guessing what users value requires Metaverse to identify these induced values for specific users or user groups. These induced values should reflect the inherent or explicit obligations included in chosen organizational strategy. Users of Metaverse services express what they value by their behavior. The company can infer what users value from their choices of services and how they use these services. Both those who currently use services (choosers) and those who could, but chose not to provide a basis for making guesses about value (Schwalbe, 2005).
The competitive success of Metaverse may well be determined by the quality of its effort in the customer group determination. This involves the affirmation of previous guesses or the restatement of what was found to be erroneous about the guesses, and further articulation, differentiation (in terms of order and significance), and description of that which is imperative for creating user value. It is here that the company either succeeds or fails to learn the basis on which Metaverse is judged by the user. To the degree that Metaverse know, understand, and successfully operationalize these expectations, the company will be considered for choice by users and ultimately earn the privilege of user choice over the long run (Schwalbe, 2005). The activities of discovery involve finding the following: functional value imperatives, parity imperatives, determinative differentials, continuity imperatives, switching imperatives, boundary constraints, and situational comparative mapping (Roebuck et al 2004).
Given any product/service, it is likely that there exists a set of user value expectations, which, if not met, represent a fundamental breach of promise to the user. An organizational system that does not ensure these functional imperatives risks the survival of the business (Pelsmacker & Kitchen 2004). Examples of functional value imperatives include: a printer must print, an automobile must transport, and an insurer must insure. User behavior can provide an understanding of current levels of user perceived value of system outcomes. These behaviors provide insight regarding implied comparative deficiencies. However, these deficiencies may result from mistakes in value determination and system management. These mistakes include: (1) misguessing, (2) misordering (3) misinterpreting significance, (4) miscategorizing, (5) misjudging competitive strategic value responses, (6) inappropriate systems implementation, or (7) misexecution (Peppers & Rogers, 2005).
Customer Orientation
Comparative deficiencies may result in switching behavior by the user. Switching usually results from either a breach of producer/supplier responsibility or an extraordinary value improvement made by a competitor, or from both. Since switching can result from both events, care must be taken in interpreting this behavior. It is best to conduct a thorough investigation of the reasons for a user switching before drawing any conclusions. Once the switching behavior has occurred, subsequent user behavior reveals more information about perceived user value. There exist many levels of perceived value. The following behaviors represent increasing levels of perceived value by users. These behaviors should confirm user value and should be studied to determine the causes of and rationale for such choice behaviors. The behavior provides a means of uncovering the truly important information. Users can be grouped according to their behaviors to study their rationale and the reasons for using services (Pelsmacker & Kitchen 2004).
Sampling behavior may convey that the user perceives some potential value in service but has not yet experienced it. The user may sample because of price, curiosity, or desire for a change. Upon sampling the product/service, he or she realizes some value that may be confirmed in subsequent choice behaviors.
Preference means the lowest level of value being preferred. However, preference is a loose binding between the user and creator of value. Given reasonable alternatives, the users’ first choice is their preference. But other Metaverse’s services are, and will be, considered and selected at times. Preference smacks of objectivity and practicality.
Favor is given for favor received, contractually. This simple relationship may be the first level of social obligation. Implicit in this relationship between user and provider is a social contract. Objectivity and practicality become subordinate to personal reciprocity.
A state is reached where the user will continue to seek out the product/service. The relationship between the producer/supplier and the user has gone beyond transaction and contract. Them exists a bona fide commitment based on confidence that satisfaction will result.
The users hold little or no reservation about referring another potential user to the company’s services. User confidence has reached a sufficient level that they consider it no risk to their reputation as competent to refer others. If asked, they willingly volunteer organization as the most likely to deliver what is valued.
When exclusivity is reached, other competitors find it difficult, if not impossible, to gain the consideration of users. Exclusive use is the ultimate strategic barrier to be created for the purpose of eliminating any competitive threat. This privilege is reserved for those most responsive in creating user value.
Organizational Activities
Technological Level
As system owner, Metaverse should use the initial guess concerning what is valued to engage in the Organizational Systems Management cycle of activities. Organizational systems management must be viewed as perpetual improvement activities (Kitchen et al 2004). The initial activities of strategic systems management require the development of knowledge intended to increase understanding of existing strategic systems. Strategic system managers are required to learn about what currently exists through description and assessment of system architecture, operations, and outcomes. Metaverse should identify those organizational system elements that contribute to or detract from that which is valued, realized, and sacrificed by the users. Metaverse must ultimately control and change those elements to create increasing value for users (Pelsmacker & Kitchen 2004).
The main activities which prepare Metaverse for change in client communication are description of the communication, assess to services standardization and change. These four sets of activities are applied to organizational strategic systems. Managers need to describe the specific systems assess the ability of these systems to create user value, Standardize the implementation of each system with the members of the organization to ensure its maintenance and stability, and accelerate constructive change of the strategic systems to enhance value for users. Thus, the results of user value determination must guide this work in creating, providing, and improving organizational systems (Kitchen & Schultz 2000).
In order to improve organizational systems, managers must first describe new client communication patterns to provide understanding and familiarity with those systems. Ultimately, this understanding must be validated against reality. The following activities require Metaverse management to describe those systems: identify and scope, establish ownership, determine value contribution, diagram and justify, operationally define, establish measures/metrics, baseline, and conduct cause/result analysis (Holm, 2006).
A terse statement should identify the system suggest the user’s underlying expectation, and reflect the organization’s strategy. The scope of the identified system must be determined. Of what does this system consist? With what other systems might this system interact? What is the potential interdependency of this system with other organizational systems identified as critical to the strategy of the organization? What boundaries, interfaces, relationships, interactions, and potential interdependencies exist with the other systems? An understanding of system scope helps Metaverse management decide who may assist the company in describing the current system, assessing the current system, standardizing the system, and changing the system. Establishing ownership requires more than just assigning an individual’s name to a system. Metaverse must clarify what the company (as owner) think ownership means. What will be required of the owner? What will be required of others throughout the internal organization? What may be required of others outside the organization, for example, suppliers and government agencies. Using the best guess about user value made in the last three activities of the project quadrant of the Value Determination cycle (i.e., Assumed Responses, Induced Values, Behaviorally Expressed Values), Metaverse can tentatively decide about what users value (Graydon, 2003). Common sense will guide this initial selection. This information can be used to determine a preliminary set of user value expectations that are required from the company’s systems. These systems must be managed to contribute to these value expectations.
Training and Education of Employees
Metaverse should educate those who make a contribution to client communication. This responsibility must not be interpreted simply as training those who make a contribution. To educate means much more. Education means a seeking of new knowledge. As system owner Metaverse should lead all others in seeking and developing new knowledge about the system, in light of its critical contribution to organization success and survival. Metaverse should learn the limitations to and/or opportunities for improving customer/user net value. This learning can be turned into constructive, purposeful, ongoing system.
Metaverse should recognize the following threats in clients’ communication:
Recognize the dangers of poor writing. In addition to being a risk to a corporation ‘s image, poor writing can also be a liability risk. Misstating company policies and the like in a customer e-mail, chat text, and so on can have severe legal consequences for a company (Graydon, 2003).
Train all front liners to write effectively. Even as late as five years ago, a firm’s “official” letter writing was reserved for management. Now, frontline agents are expected to respond. In today’s call center, every frontline person needs effective writing skills. Attempting to reserve e-mail writing only for agents who are already good writers does not work in the long run. Metaverse’s system will be plagued with bottlenecks. Arming all front liners with adequate writing skills is the wiser approach (Graydon, 2003).
Revise corporate style guides. Many corporations already have a style guide illustrating acceptable formats for internal memos, customer proposals, and so on. The style guide should now be updated to include professional guidelines for composing customer e-mail and the like (Graydon, 2003).
Make a writing test part of the hiring process. Test a prospective agent’s writing skills. For example, devise a writing exercise in which the prospective agent writes an e-mail message in response to a simulated e-mail from a customer. Evaluate the prospective employee’s e-mail sample for thought process, clarity, and grammar (Graydon, 2003).
Build boilerplate text that is easy to customize. Perhaps the only thing worse than an e-mail full of ambiguous sentences and grammatical errors is a canned response that fails to answer the customer’s real question in the first place. Make sure suggested response templates and prescripted chat phrases allow appropriate customizing (Graydon, 2003).
Carefully measure an agent’s performance. Self-serve Websites and knowledge bases are designed to let customers resolve for themselves questions that have simple answers. That’s why building a knowledge base with the sole intention of reducing agent talk time can backfire. In fact, knowledge management can actually cause talk time between customer and agent to rise. Yet many companies discourage the agent from spending adequate time with a customer by rewarding agents who have the shortest call cycle. A customer survey that measures the agent’s performance is a better gauge. Measuring the rate of agent referral of questions to others is another meaningful metric (Graydon, 2003).
One of the most common reasons for losing good employees is that a company sets high customer loyalty standards without giving the employee the capability and tools to perform to that expectation. In today’s competitive marketplace, customer loyalty systems may require hefty spending on technology to ensure that the frontline employee has the tools needed to be loyalty-driven. A leading financial brokerage firm understands that not all customers require the same level of service or generate the same revenue (Fill, 2006). The company recently installed a telephone-computer system that recognizes individual clients by their telephone numbers when they call. Large accounts and callers who make frequent transactions are automatically routed to their own senior account representative. Those customers who place only an occasional order may be routed to a more junior representative. In either situation, the customer’s record appears on the representative’s screen before the call is taken. Such a system entails a host of service benefits for the company and its customers. For example, similar accounts can be grouped under one rep who specializes in that instrument, removing the need to train every rep on every financial tool. In addition, the company can direct certain value-added services to only those clients it knows would be interested. Another example of technology playing a major role in a customer loyalty system is United Parcel Service, which has outfitted each driver with an electronic clipboard that includes a stylus and a pressure-sensitive receipt pad. Consignee signatures are downloaded overnight, and by the next day, volume senders who subscribe to a special service can log on to database from their PC to check on the status of key packages.
An organization’s security and future success is related to the rate of managed change that enhances value for the users. Demonstrated system change should be the norm. Metaverse may accelerate the constructive change of the organizational systems which demonstrates enhancement of the value for users. Change of systems must provide improved creation of value for the user. Metaverse must narrow any negative gap between what the systems currently create and what customers will value in the future via systems improvement. In addition, Metaverse management should eliminate the potential for any negative gap to occur. Successful integration of value determination and systems management activities improves the creation of value for the user relative to competing alternatives, and thereby increases organizational competitiveness (Gupta & Lehmann, 2005). All rewards, appreciation systems, and policies should promote systematic and orderly system change to increase user value. The quality of such changes must be directed toward higher and higher user behaviors that confirm user value. Ideally, changes would be led by user articulation of next levels of expectations, but organizations should not be tied to this constraint. Organization initiatives may be required to anticipate new value expectations. Proactive pursuit of system knowledge is required to change systems for improved value creation. This learning for change involves the following activities: conduct cause and value effects analyses, determine critical relationships, determine leverage points, test operational viability, conduct breakthrough analysis, and test external value impact.
Metaverse should conduct cause and value effects analyses. This is the third time that causal analysis has been mentioned. First is cause and result analysis, and second, cause and statistical effect analysis, i.e., what causes the average and/or the extremes of variability to change. In cause and value effects analysis, another type of cause is sought. What causes user value effects to change? What causes significant improvement in value effects? What might be changed and in what way is it possible to create enhanced value? What determines the limitation of value which can be produced or supplied with the existing system? (Gupta & Lehmann, 2005).
Customers’ Expectations
Users have come to expect Metaverse to have effective communication for (1) responding upon demand to the individual’s desire to have an item materialize in another’s possession; (2) providing secure, informed, and timely movement of items; and (3) providing confident materialization of the item in the possession of the desired party. These unique systems are the explicit derivatives of the strategy of Metaverse. Selecting and fulfilling those responsibilities for which it willingly commits itself, Metaverse enacts how it will get to where it wants to go. It thereby sets out its strategy for moving forward from where it currently is to its desired future. Its degree of success is a function of two primary factors. (1) Are the responsibilities chosen valued and to what degree? (2) If so, how much more net value can it produce for its users when compared with competitive alternatives? Net value is defined here as that which is realized by the user which justifies what he or she has to sacrifice. Thoughtful consideration of an organization’s explicit obligation to create and manage these suprasystems suggests that any compromise of responsibility may be met with rejection, particularly if others (viable competitors) exist (Gupta & Lehmann, 2005).
Customer/user-identified values determine the strategic purpose of an organization relative to its product and/or services. The organization’s agreed upon purpose determines the critical management systems to be managed by an organization’s leadership. Current organizational structures likely reflect local ownership of subordinate operational subsystems and/or processes that have been derived for the satisfaction of organizational goals/objectives. However, such subsystems and/or processes are not necessarily the descriptors of the strategic suprasystems of organization. The total membership of an organization must be led to the understanding that the strategic suprasystems expectations must direct, drive, and encompass the relevant subordinate functional systems and processes, regardless of the existing organizational structure. A strategic communication management will evolve. It is the rate of change to new systemic designs and their successful implementation which ensures the longevity of the organization. These strategically imposed organizational suprasystems will describe appropriate organizational structures, tasks, roles, relationships, and responsibilities (Carnegie, 2003).
First and foremost, managers must confirm that customers’ perception of realized value and sacrifice match their expectations. The questions, “What did we say we would do and have we done it” (Chitty et al 2005, p. 23) can be answered only by asking those who assisted in defining what was expected, the customers. Using the perceived net value maps (developed in the strategic factor analyses) in a longitudinal study, managers can measure the value realized and sacrifice made by customers. Changes in communication will provide evidence of improvement in customers’ perceptions of net value (Chitty et al 2005). However, managers must discount illegitimate selection behavior brought about by the constrained availability of alternatives or by offers of artificial value (Dow, 1999).
In addition to moving customers to the top of the stakeholder list, this new model is also dramatically different in content. Typically, mission statements focus on the Metaverse’s services, but many firms fall captive to their own technology and fail to adapt to changing customer needs. Whereas mission statements specifying services assume customer need, a statement of responsibility focuses emphatically on the customer need and value, and then commits the firm to designing and producing services to meet that need (Chitty et al 2005). Determining responsibility means that top management willingly chooses to perpetually act so as to satisfy a well-defined set of needs and values of clearly defined groups of customers. Only then can managers specify the services that meet the defined needs. Such a firm’s statement of responsibility would focus on “the creation and continuous improvement of best net value services,” and the firm would thereby intend “to become increasingly preferred by customers when compared to alternatives.” Artificial value offerings achieved by overselling product value or short-term price reductions on the product/service would be a violation of the mission. This describes a covenant view of the relationship between firms and customers based on bona fide provisioning, not bargained exchange (Dow, 1999).
Metaverse should determine leverage points. It will be necessary to conduct studies to establish causation and to establish the effects of causal changes on dependent value outcomes. Controlled, designed experiments provide a methodology for such detective inquiries. It is important to test operational viability. Potential change options identified through systems leverage point studies may or may not prove viable to an organization. Organizational resource availability, and/or net value after investment, may not justify change. An organizational analysis must be conducted to determine viability, by identifying the factors that inhibit and facilitate the use of these system leverage points. Viability might also be tested with trend-setting user(s). Metaverse will have to conduct background analysis.
While value breakthrough can result from current system studies, alternate system designs will likely be necessary. Innovation and creativity must be managed in conceptualizing, evaluating, and confidently introducing alternate systems. The credibility of new alternative systems can be judged in comparison with existing system performance. Statistical control charts and other statistical methods, for example, analysis of variance, can be used to evaluate the significance of alternative systems breakthrough. Furthermore, Metaverse management should test the objective significance of statistical results against the confirmed subjective appreciation of users. The value impact of decisions to change current systems and/or introduce alternative systems needs to be tested. Since the users are the final judge of value, a representative group of users should be maintained with whom new value contributions can be evaluated, in terms of order and significance of value components (Freeland, 2002). Practical and valid survey research instruments must be developed by which Metaverse can assess the potential effectiveness of new offerings of value.
Organizational Structure and Leadership
Leadership
Effective change processes should be supported by training and leadership. It is likely that many organizations have no idea of their responsibilities as perceived by their customers. Self-interest and organizational strategic planning concepts have masked the understanding of managerial responsibility explicitly selected in the development of strategy. Inherent in the selection of organizational strategy are critical strategic systems. Organizational implications, which may result from such a reorientation and their obligatory operational considerations, are discussed. Some individuals have significantly affected the way leaders of organizations think about the responsibilities of the business and the behavior of their leadership, their membership, and those that support their efforts. Many organizations have sought improvement in the organization’s performance through reorganization. Appropriateness of structure, tasks, roles, relationships, and responsibilities would appear to have been behind the organizational redesigner quests. Designers of structural reorganization have experimented with new structural models (Freeland, 2002).
Before the change in client relations Metaverse managers must take a more holistic approach to study and improve organizational systems. The systems that are important to strategic survival produce results that are highly valued by customers. They are complex because they typically consist of subsystems that cut horizontally across the organization. The subsystems are interrelated. The output of one subsystem often acts as the input of another subsystem. Managers, then, must initially extend the boundaries of any system improvement effort to include the subsystems that contribute to the performance of the larger system under study. The importance of each subsystem in achieving increased value for the customer must be established in order to prioritize and coordinate improvement efforts. The establishment of subsystem importance is likely to be based on subjective rather than objective criteria (Converse, 2007). The performance of each important subsystem must be evaluated against its intended purpose and expected results. This evaluation provides the information on which to base subsequent work activity and to leverage improved performance. This approach represents a field focus view. All critical parts that interact with one another are included in the field. After studying the field, the focus is narrowed to the component of concern. This approach is more complex and requires more initial planning and coordination effort before the managers can initiate changes in the system. It is necessary in order to avoid suboptimization and the attendant ineffective utilization of organizational resources.
The competence of individual managers is fundamental to their successful performance in managing organizational systems for customer value. Competence results from individual aptitudes, attributes, abilities, and skills. The relationship between these components of competence and job performance has been demonstrated in a variety of job settings and through managerial assessment centers. Clearly, individual competence inherently limits or enhances performance once an individual decides to “perform.” Under equal circumstances, for example, systems and resources, more skill outperforms less skill (Converse, 2007).
Ability is important but not sufficient. The powerful effects of motivation on performance should not be overlooked. Competence affects performance through both ability and motivation. Motivation to perform results from one’s beliefs, desires, self-concept, self-perceived abilities, and perceptions of environmental demands and potential inhibitors. These motivational forces form the basis for psychological processes of behavioral choice, that is, the decision to expend effort and to persist in the face of obstacles and aversive experiences (Converse, 2007). The specific competencies that are important will vary according to the organization and the managerial position. The diverse competencies that may be important include statistical understanding of variation, investigatory skills, analytical skills, creativity, fortitude, social skills, technical and engineering knowledge, leadership abilities, abstract thinking, and risk tolerance. Avoidance of the prescribed managerial role may reflect the lack of managerial self-confidence or competence (Greenberg, 2004).
Implementing the managerial leadership model will often require a resocialization or rescripting of managers, in terms of new role perceptions and new behaviors. The behavior of managers represents the key to competitive improvement. All employees must ultimately be involved in improving and maintaining organizational suprasystems. Managerial leaders must regard all employees as human resources with great potential for contribution. Without the appropriate managerial behaviors, however, programs focused on the lowest levels of the organization will fail to reach their full potential, and people will not be given the opportunity to grow and contribute (Greenberg, 2004). Managerial leaders and managers must purposefully pull worker participation into their personal improvement efforts. Any “employee involvement” should have strategic focus and exist within the context of appropriate managerial behaviors and organizational culture. When the managerial leaders have created the right culture for their organization, stories and symbols will arise among the ranks to reinforce the theme of customer value (Fill, 2006).
Communication Issues
Quality initiatives, improvement programs are generally doomed if they are not done in the appropriate context. For example, an organizational culture that encourages change, or a highly competent management team, might have enabled the activities to continue, in spite of the negative pressures emanating from the control system. Obviously, the probabilities of success are highest when all the organizational elements encourage, support, and reward those activities that improve systems to create customer value. Organizations are increasingly challenged to change. Employees must adapt to the changing internal and external conditions. Survey information is one way for managerial leaders to gather information, prompt discussion and communication, and identify areas that need attention and modification or total change (Kitchen & Schultz 2006). New behavior by managers leads to changes in operating processes and systems, which leads to improved customer value and ultimately to better numbers on the bottom line. The time lag required to improve systems for customer value makes periodic assessment worthwhile to assure continued progress. Through this assessment managers focus their attention on the aspects of individual managers, organizational culture, and organizational management systems, as shown in the figure, which may act as barriers to improvement. Having a system to run on is important for building loyalty; procedures, guidelines, tracking systems, and communication materials are important tools that help the employee perform. The real success of loyalty system is not just in having the right tools but in having those tools used by employees with a loyalty-driven attitude.
Changes in those elements precede the permanent, long-term improvement in bottom-1line results. It depends on the nature of the production or service processes and on the beginning state or starting point. It may take a minimum of six months to a year before positive bottom-line results can be seen, and even longer to notice improvement in competitive market position (Silver, 2007). So, the rate of progress through time must exceed that of competitors to provide preferred value alternatives. Market share will improve more slowly, or not at all, if competitors improve value at a greater rate. The central idea that individual, organizational culture, and management systems are critical to providing value for customers is elaborated below (Kitchen & Schultz 2006).
Customer value is not improved simply by stating goals. Managers must take action on the system of causes, the means of providing value for customers. Standards are not to remain constant but are to be continuously revised and improved. System improvement should be a major part of a manager’s ordinary job, and not a sideline activity. Managers must perceive their primary role to be system improvement. Managers should take specific responsibility for improving the strategic suprasystems and subsystems of their organization. This improvement should include continuous incremental improvement, such as reduced variation, and discontinuous improvement, such as breakthrough innovation (Silver, 2007).
Improvements in Performance
For Metaverse, new clients’ communication means improved structure and relations inside the company. Action to improve a system must be based on thorough knowledge of the system. Managers must be personally involved in the knowledge development process. This knowledge of the system includes an understanding of variation in systems and the causal relationships among the system’s inputs, processes, and outcomes (Smith & Taylor 2004). Metaverse cannot take appropriate action to improve the system without such knowledge of causal relationships, special causes, and common causes. Therefore, managers are responsible for knowing the details of systems. This knowledge comes about through the hard work of observation, investigation, data collection, statistical analysis, and synthesis of information. To improve competitiveness, managers must have a personal knowledge base to improve value-providing systems for customers. Managers must not rely exclusively on staff assistants as data gatherers and analysts but must engage in learning themselves (Silver, 2007).
Cross-Functional Cooperation
Cross-functional cooperation is absolutely necessary to enable the integration of the various functions for customer value. The reason is obvious: efforts to enhance customer value require sharing information, collaboration, and integration of activities. The critical systems that provide customer value and enable continuous improvement are largely cross-functional systems. In segmented functional organizations, there is no one who “owns” these important systems. Thus, in the important tasks, the functions are mutually interdependent (Smith & Taylor 2004). All important problems are cross-functional in nature. His logic is that problems within the complete control of a single functional unit will get attention and will, if truly important, be resolved. The responsibility for such problems is crystal clear. Thus, the only important problems remaining are the cross functional ones — those that no single functional manager owns and can solve alone. High levels of cross-functional cooperation are difficult to achieve owing to functionalism. The natural tendency of functional managers is to talk mostly among themselves and to concentrate on their own functional objectives. Ibis tendency is reinforced by conventional control and reward systems in the majority of organizations. The combination creates “segmented organizations” in which managers focus their attention on meeting short-term functional efficiency and output goals. The presence or absence of cross-functional cooperation indicates whether the cross-functional systems of the organization are owned and managed. Lack of such cooperation is a symptom of system deficiency. The answer does not lie in forcing cooperation at functional interfaces, but in drafting functional activities into system participation (Schwalbe, 2005).
The Internet environment presents an alternative: permission or opt-in marketing, whereby prospects and customers allow a firm to market to them specific services about which they have expressed interest. For example, prospective buyers typically opt in when searching a Website for information (“Check this box to receive a monthly e-mail newsletter about our latest widget news”) or purchasing online (“Check here to receive online notification of our next sale”). The interrelationship of Value Determination and Systems Management cycles is especially critical for managers to understand (Schwalbe, 2005). One set of activities has little impact on an organization’s competitiveness without the other. These authors place value determination as the lead set of activities, which makes a lot of sense if Metaverse management considers a single iteration of the cycles. In practice, over time, however, it may be more difficult to establish which comes first under the mandate of continuous improvement. The activities of the two cycles may appear simultaneous and intermingled, as the two strands of the model. Managerial leaders and managers should be prepared to flow from one set of activities to the other to ensure their integration. For example, value determination may be used to seek opportunities where existing/modified systems can be more competitive, and experimentation for continuous improvement may reveal understanding about user value (Pelsmacker & Kitchen 2004).
A powerful way for creating goodwill about business is to customers and clients an online community through which to share. After all, this very purpose is how the Internet came into being in the first place. But getting buy-in for the online community across the dealer network wasn’t immediate. From the beginning, Ace corporate worked diligently to communicate and demonstrate the advantages and explain the resources to dealers, who were not accustomed to using computers, let alone the Internet. Filled out information-request cards from magazines or at conventions, or who inquired about services through the company web site. Ace traditionally mailed magazine and convention leads to dealers, trying to distribute them fairly and without favoritism. Now, similar leads are promptly posted online for dealers to pursue on a first-come/first-serve basis (Pelsmacker & Kitchen 2004).
Metaverse should begin online community development with a clear vision on how an e-community help audience. It is imperative that the community site supports firm’s existing business model and provides people with clear reasons to participate. For example, diet company SlimFast’s community site includes a personalized virtual buddy system. The company anticipates that socially connected customers will more likely stay committed to their diets and, in turn, their SlimFast product purchases. The site’s reason for being is to present information the community finds relevant, useful, and profitable. Identify clear performance measures and on a regular basis, report on the progress. Such measures might include percentage of best customers using the site’s message board, average lapse time between user’s information request and answer provided, and so forth. Giving customers a forum to communicate comes with watchdog responsibilities. Unprofessional online behavior by users, message board questions that linger unanswered, and online coaching sessions that veer off topic ultimately reflect poorly upon the company. Metaverse should assign a staff member to watch over all content to ensure the resource remains professional, reliable, and user-friendly (Pelsmacker & Kitchen 2004).
Defining infrastructure also involves four components: workforce, quality, production planning and control, and organizational structure. Workforce decisions include establishing the planned skill level for employees, determining how skill level will influence wages, and firming practices for handling employees during swings in the business cycle (Ariss et al 2002). Quality decisions encompass selecting between prevention, monitoring, and intervention as the basis for providing the desired level. Production planning and control decisions involve deciding on sourcing policies (limited number versus low bid), selecting between centralized versus decentralized procurement practices, and establishing decision rules for meeting commitments on delivery dates. Organization decisions include establishing a formal structure, defining the level in the organization that selected decisions are to be made, formulating the role of staff groups, and effectively communicating the reward system for recognizing outstanding performance.
Maintaining consistency in the pattern of decisions will provide improvement in competitive position, given the firm’s choice of priorities. A firm, again according to Hayes and Wheelwright, basically has four competitive dimensions: cost, quality, dependability, flexibility. Lower cost is the more common competitive priority and needs no further elaboration. Quality is achieved by providing higher product reliability or performance in a standard product or by offering unique features unavailable in competing services. The market must obviously be willing to pay any additional price required if additional costs are incurred to achieve the higher quality level. Dependability can consist of several different desired capabilities. The product can be dependable by working as specified. Dependability can take the form of on-time delivery or of being able to quickly and effectively mobilize resources to correct any failures that occur after delivery (Ariss et al 2002). Flexibility can take two forms: product flexibility and volume flexibility. Product flexibility requires the ability to handle difficult, nonstandard orders and to take the lead in product innovation. Volume flexibility requires that a firm be able to accelerate or decelerate production very quickly and to rearrange orders so as to meet demands for unusually fast delivery. Metaverse must give different emphasis to each of the competitive dimensions.
In essence, those who decide to be all things to all people end up being (as a best case) second best in all areas (Langford, 2006). The route to competitive position, therefore, is to excel in one of the dimensions and to be competitive in the others. Prioritizing the dimensions will allow the organization to define desired structure and infrastructure and to resolve any conflicts that might occur. While low cost and differentiation are usually seen as mutually exclusive, a value-based strategy may require and achieve both. Since many customers now count time rather than dollar cost as their most precious asset, a high-quality strategy provides little competitive advantage unless it is paired with low cost (i.e., low price and/or sacrifice reduction). Similarly, low-cost/price strategies may also fail if they are not complemented with quality perceived to be of sufficient value. The synergistic combination of low cost and differentiation that may come with a value-based strategy is a direct result of managing critical systems that contribute to value. To analyze the systemic nature of value-based strategies, the managers turn to the processes and content of strategic management. But this theoretical objectivity is frequently limited by any personal dispositions the firm’s strategist(s) may have toward certain stakeholders; many firms’ goals appear to represent only selected internal stakeholders. Although strategists’ personal predispositions are rarely considered in these models, they often determine the strategy formulation process, the strategy formulated, and the resulting path of strategy implementation (Langford, 2006).
Conclusion
Metaverse should plan and introduce preliminary activities in order to change the ways client communication is done. It is found that Metaverse management should ultimately develop a strategy to increase the volume of services while improving organizational culture and leadership, introduce training for employees and value creation activities. Metaverse should make this transition by enhancing its capabilities in the areas of quality and service, service taking the form of reliable deliveries. The company further decides selectively to identify higher leverage opportunities for improvement, focusing on those areas that would be very highly valued by customers such that improvements would be recognized in a short timeframe. To ensure that efforts are properly focused, the leaders should structure service teams and introduce cross functional communication. These teams are headed by the managers to reinforce the focus on customers and include one representative from each of the key functional areas. With acceptance of determined responsibilities, the organization is also committed to providing for the customer’s net value for some time to come, not just for the moment. Managerial leaders must confirm the appropriateness of choices they made on net value to be offered. Customers’ selection behavior, as measured by validly obtained market share, provides key confirmation that they perceived best net value.
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