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| Roth studies the area where operations meets marketing |
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Roth's Research Explores the Strategic design of Customer Experiences
Wanted: Chief Experience Officer.
Job description: Someone who will serve as brand guardian and ensure consistent experiences throughout all areas of the business. A dynamic leader who will lead tactical, experiential teams to implement new and different ideas.
UNC Kenan-Flagler professor Aleda Roth is studying the area where operations meets marketing, and her focus is on the importance of building a great customer experience into service design and delivery. The concept of the chief experience officer or the lead choreographer of the customer experience is one that companies such as Disney understand well, Roth says.
Disney's theme parks are a great example of the marriage of operations and marketing. The company designs each theme park from the beginning with the customer experience in mind, she says.
"Every part of the Disney theme park is designed with the customer in mind," says Roth, Mary Farley Ames Lee Distinguished Professor of Operations, Technology and Innovation Management and head of the MBA global supply-chain management concentration. Roth "graduated" from Disney's Institute of Management in 1999. "An example is the water fountains - one for the adult and one for the child - with detailed pictures at the child's eye level.
"As another example, Disney understands the number of people they can allow in the park to deliver great customer experiences. They won't allow people in the park if they reach their planned capacity level. These are all operations issues, but they affect customer service."
Roth was selected in September 2004 for a prestigious two-year international fellowship at London Business School, supported by the Advanced Institute of Management Research (AIM) , which develops United Kingdom-based, world-class management research. Roth is investigating the following:
- Innovation, with a focus on an organization's climate for innovation cross-culturally
- The role of operations and technology strategies in creating customers' experiences with products and services
- New service design in a global context
- Global supply-chain and logistics strategies
Every researcher participating in AIM is a recognized leader in his or her field and is drawn from a wide variety of universities in both the United Kingdom and overseas.
The AIM research resulted in a study by Roth and her colleagues on Britain's hospitality industry.
In "A Tale of Two Countries' Conservatism, Service Quality and Feedback on Customer Satisfaction," Roth and co-authors propose that valuable customer feedback might be overlooked in Britain, thus the opportunity is lost to improve service design and delivery, creating a vicious cycle.
A regular visitor to London for over a decade, Roth says she was struck by the fact that Britons just don't expect good service. For example, they're more tolerant of long queues, and they don't complain about them.
"London may get people for the first time - visitors who want to see Westminster Abbey or the House of Parliament or other tourist sites - but you also want to bring them back. And that's where good service becomes important," Roth told MSNBC for a story on the study.
"Without intervention, British service firms will continue to deliver levels of service lower than would be acceptable in the United States," the authors write in the Journal of Service Research. Roth's co-authors are Christopher Voss of London Business School and the AIM, Eve Rosenzweig (PhD '02) of Emory University, Kate Blackmon (MBA '87 PhD '97) of the University of Oxford and Richard B. Chase of the University of Southern California.
London has begun funding courses sponsored by the London Development Agency that aim to improve hospitality, according to the MSNBC story.
"U.S. companies who develop solid complaint-handling mechanisms can feed that back into the system and design the process better," says Roth, citing Citibank as an example of a company that does this well. "How do you recoup from failures? Businesses from McDonald's to Disney have service recovery strategies for handling service failures."
Roth says you can look at entertainment venues such as Harrah's and performances such as Cirque du Soleil to see how artfully the customer experience is choreographed.
A great customer service experience creates an emotional bond between companies and customers that is difficult for competitors to break, Roth adds. The chief experience officer integrates experience practices across functions and divisions such as HR, operations and marketing, rather than having them operate in silos.
"Theater is expertly choreographed, but businesses don't do that. Yet great customer experiences reinforce and ultimately characterize great brands," she says. Examples of good British "brand experience centers" include Guinness Storehouse in Dublin, Ireland and Cadbury World in Birmingham, England.
UNC Executive Education Launches New Marketing Seminars
Two new seminars - focusing on marketing metrics and marketing strategies for growth - are being launched by UNC Kenan-Flagler's Executive Education this spring.
Although the seminars are designed for different audiences, they share two overriding themes in common, according to marketing professor Sridhar Balasubramanian, the faculty adviser.
- They focus on the interface between marketing and other disciplines. For example, how to present a marketing proposal to top finance managers.
- They focus on tools. "This is knowledge that is useful and usable. Managers will be able to take these tools back to their work environment and use them to make better business decisions."
Marketing initiatives can have an impact on the success of the entire business, Balasubramanian says.
"Everyone should have some understanding of marketing essentials and how marketing works," he says.
Marketing is particularly challenging because you need a mix of soft and hard skills, he adds. That's where the seminar, "Marketing Metrics: Managing Marketing to Create Shareholder Value" (April 11-12) comes into play. More than ever, marketing managers must be able to demonstrate the financial returns on their marketing investments and to speak "the language of finance."
"Marketing Metrics strengthens the analytical side. When you need money for marketing expenditures, the CEO may say, 'Why should I put the money there?'" Balasubramanian says. "It's important for marketing managers to conceptualize and communicate the implications of their marketing investments."
"Marketing Strategies for Growth" (June 6-9) is for marketing managers who are seeking profitable growth, whether in product or service markets. The seminar focuses on frameworks that will help managers identify critical opportunities, shape ideas into winning products and services, and successfully bring those products and services to market.
"Companies tell us that growth is a huge issue - and it's critical to know how to leverage marketing knowledge and skills to help you grow new and different areas of your business," says Executive Education Program Director Susan Palmer.
In addition to Balasubramanian, UNC Kenan-Flagler faculty teaching in the seminars include marketing professors Bill Putsis, Gal Zauberman, Rebecca Ratner and Barry Bayus and finance professor Bob Connolly.
"These seminars harness the research and teaching strengths of our
marketing faculty. For instance, Gal Zauberman and Rebecca Ratner specialize in consumer behavior issues, and Barry Bayus specializes in new product development," Palmer says.
UNC Kenan-Flagler's marketing area combines the strengths of cutting-edge research and award-winning teaching. Marketing faculty are noted for their influential contributions to multiple marketing disciplines, including service quality, innovation and growth management, consumer decision-making and marketing strategy.
The September 2004 issue of The Wall Street Journal ranked UNC Kenan-Flagler No. 8 for marketing in the "excellence by discipline" category.
MAC Alum is VP and Controller of Havertys Furniture Companies
Justin Seamonds (MAC '94), vice president and controller of Havertys Furniture Companies, entered UNC Kenan-Flagler's MAC Program in the summer of 1993. He was a newly minted graduate of Duke University, with a double major in economics and English.
That summer turned out to be pretty intense, as Seamonds and his classmates - many of whom shared his background in liberal arts - found themselves immersed in accounting all day long.
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| Justin Seamonds |
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He remembers fondly the "boot camp," that initial part of his 12-month MAC experience, where he took 4 core accounting courses. Classes were 4 days a week.
"It was immersion, which was the whole point," Seamonds says. "It kept me on my toes, certainly."
During his senior year at Duke, Seamonds had been steered toward accounting by the director of recruiting for an accounting and consulting firm. He quickly enrolled in "Intro to Accounting," and had a great professor and a great experience. The same recruiting director then steered him toward UNC Kenan-Flagler's MAC Program. After the immersion summer, Seamonds took some general MBA classes in which he learned about manufacturing, and mergers and acquisitions.
Following graduation, Seamonds went to work in the Atlanta office of BDO Seidman LLP, the same accounting and consulting firm that had advised him. He also worked as vice president of finance for a small manufacturer and distributor of beverages, and CFO for a communications tower developer.
Today he is vice president and controller for Havertys, a $780 million furniture retailer with 116 stores in the south, central and eastern United States. His biggest project since arriving in 2003 was converting Havertys to a new companywide accounting system in 150 days. He also developed a new accounting structure for store-level reporting, analysis and decision-making, and was named to the 11-member management committee in his first year.
Seamonds says his MAC degree rounded him out, gave him a specialty and a valuable advanced degree. His undergraduate education taught him how to think. The MAC degree taught him what to think about.
"A liberal arts education teaches you how to think and deal with abstract concepts, how to communicate, interpret and infer from things that you're seeing," he says. "The MAC Program's intimacy and quality allows you to leverage your existing education."
And in the current accounting environment, he's calling upon all aspects of his educational background daily.
"We're definitely at a crossroads," he says. "We've got at least 3 binding, rule-making authorities, and no one knows exactly how to interpret or apply some of these new rules. The accountants are the ones who, at the end of the day, have to get it right and manage the control infrastructure to offer confidence in the final numbers."
"The only sanity in the world of accounting relies on the ethics and technical abilities of those driving the system. That's what the world needs - strong, ethical accountants who can understand and apply the rules as all of these folks keep throwing them at us."
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