Question

The operations management function takes cognisance of clients’ needs and continuously formulates its management strategies and objectives strengthens and expands customer base and competitiveness. With reference to the Uber case study presented above, discuss any five of the six main elements which forms part of customer needs. NB: Your answer should be a minimum of 500 to a maximum of 650 words. Markers are to stop marking after the threshold of 650 words has been reached. Please indicate the word count at the end your answer.

Answer 1

The demand of the customers:

1. Reliability

Network and systems reliability is central to delivering an outstanding customer experience.

2. Availability

Customers expect to contact Uber on their terms, using email, chat, voice calls, messaging or portals. They expect their enquiry to be answered in a timely manner and do not want to waste time waiting or repeating questions.

3. Simplicity

Our customers expect doing business with Uber to be easy every step of the way. From ordering to using our solutions, Uber listens to what customers say and help make their lives simple – so they can focus on running their business.

4. Adaptation

Because each customer is unique,Uber provides adaptable, scalable solutions and services that are tailored to their specific needs.

5. Accountability

As a trusted partner to customers, Uber offers the best certified know-how and have a proven track record of driving digital transformation.

6.pricing

The main demand of the customers of the company is providing them with the lowest price for the purpose of travelling from one place to other. Due to the increasing of rate of inflation in many countries across the world and the value of many currencies going down with the developing countries being more developed, the demand of the customers is to lower the fare for the rides they take with the company and thus in order to meet the customer demand, Uber focuses upon lowering the price of the rides (Rogers, 2015). Additionally, there are countries like India, Pakistan, and Nigeria, where the rate of unemployment is more and thus in order to serve those customers, lowering the price of the cab fare is mandatory as the customers’ demands more discount on their rides. There are also a variety of types of customers who always look for discount on their rides and some customers who prefers to travel alone.

There are also some customers who look forward to travel in a luxurious manner and also use Wi-Fi facility during the journey. Thus there are four ways of travelling that has been introduced by Uber for the purpose of travel. There is Uber Pool service introduced for the people who like to travel in cab at the lowest fare and people travelling in the same route are made to share their rides with those passengers (Geradin, 2015). There is also economic pricing that has been introduced by the company which allows the travelers to travel alone or with their family but there are no benefits of Wi-Fi or spacious cars offered to the customers like in case of premium bookings.

Thus in order to meet the demand of the lowest fares of the customers, the operations team of Uber focuses upon lowering the cost of the operations of the organization with the help of lowering the driver fares per trip. At the time of the launch when there were very less drivers who adopted the Uber model and for satisfying the customer demand, more of Uber drivers or the owner of the cars were paid with higher fares, but nowadays, the scenario has changed and Uber has become a huge company with huge number of cars working under them and thus in order to provide more discounts to the customers and charge them less, they have made a price cut upon the salary provided to the drivers or the money provided per trip to the owners of the cars (Bernhardt, 2016).