MANAGING CUSTOMER SIMULATION

The customer simulation exercise of Minnesota Micromotors Inc, was a very intriguing one. It exposed me to a variety of moving pieces that enable a successful business performance across different objectives and parameters.

The introductory note on the company and industry was helpful – in that it helped me to have a better understanding of the product and customer profile. This report also touched upon competition and growth prospects along with challenges.

My overall strategy was to ensure that I have a good customer satisfaction as product quality and performance was most critical. While we did have customers A and D who were large customers and value conscious – quality and performance across all …show more content…

I gradually kept reducing the number of sales people ultimately ended up with 8. This was not a good strategy as this impacted the quality of interactions between the customers as shown in the customer satisfaction report.

In conclusion – If I were to play this simulation again – I would do the following things differently:

1.I would ensure that time allocated to customers is proportional to their size and demands immediately. This will ensure we don’t have spare capacity with customers who are small and may not need.

2.Increase in training and marketing communication spends – While we increase allocation of sales force timing to individual customers – I would consistently increase the training spends as well. This will ensure that the quality of sales force interaction are good and customers who need special attention are taken care off.

3.R&D spends – I would avoid any spends on manufacturing efficiencies as they have shown not to yield much in this context. The resource thus saved could be utilized elsewhere. Would also allocate more spends on the thermal resistance feature. I was conservative in my allocation to this feature – this ensured that MMs products were continuously below the competition.

4.The list price seems to be very sensitive – hence unless the sales show an upward trend I would not increase the list prices. This was detrimental to the sales performance when coupled with low satisfaction rates of some larger customers owing to