LUNGELO GUMEDE (GMDLUN002)
ARE STUDENTS CUSTOMERS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN
The simple, most accepted and understandable definition is that a customer is one who pays for goods and services. University students, in general, are definitely paying or being sponsored to be part of the academic institution, therefore there is a certain income flowing into the university for the students to be there. Educating a person is considered as providing a service in the sense that work is being done by a person (the lecturer) and that work benefits someone else (the students). Educating students towards their future endeavours, is essentially what universities do. Therefore one could confidently say that universities are providing a service and students are paying for that service.
However this is not enough to ascertain that students of the University of Cape Town (UCT) are customers to the university. Being a customer stems further than the simple definition. Customers are treated or handled in a certain way which allows them to claim their status as customers. In order to strengthen the claim that students of UCT are customers to UCT, one needs to look at the typical customer mentality and customer treatment within the market place. A social comparison of students and customers would then have to be conducted.
It is acceptable to say that customers make up a large share of consumers in the market place. Consumers, normally, define the revenue of an organization. However when businesses have limited supplier and want to increase their revenue, the only way to do this is to increase prices. Therefore the idea is to keep your current consumers loyal to the brand i.e. to keep them happy. Hence the fundamental concept which states that the custome ...