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Anticipating customer needs is imperative for businesses willing to grow their market share. In highly competitive markets, the ability to meet customers evolving needs with each new product is among the main predictors of business success. The technology sector is an excellent example of a market where companies have to develop their products continuously. Apple is one of the most successful global tech companies, mainly because the products produced and sold by Apple respond to customer needs well. This paper will seek to determine and explain three non-financial measures that Apple might use in order to motivate achieving the objective of anticipating future customer needs.
In order to answer the question, it is essential to understand what the identified objective entails. On the one hand, anticipating future customer needs means that a company has good knowledge of its target market and the trends affecting it. On the other hand, it means that this knowledge is applied while designing new products. Hence, the objective is connected with the activities in research and product development. The three vital non-financial measures that could be used to evaluate the performance of Apples R&D are customer satisfaction index, project milestones accomplishment rate, and new product features released.
The first measure is crucial for Apple to achieve the identified objective because customer satisfaction with current products shows the gaps that could be addressed to meet customers needs better. It also provides a baseline for measuring the success of any future products released. For example, the company could compare the rate of satisfaction with past products and the current satisfaction rate to determine whether new products meet customer needs effectively.
The customer satisfaction index relies on a variety of non-financial measures, and the formula may vary from one company to the other. However, it would be beneficial for Apple to include customer feedback and customer loyalty measures in determining customer satisfaction. These components will provide an adequate perspective on products from the customers viewpoint.
The second measure relates to R&D projects deployed as part of Apples activities in product development and improvement. Due to the complexity of these projects, milestones are usually used to track them from initiation to completion and measure outcomes. Thus, the rate of project milestone accomplishment is a useful measure of R&D performance in new product and feature development and could help to assess response to customers evolving needs. For instance, market research is essential for anticipating customer needs, and the rate of completion of market research projects would reflect whether or not the department gathers sufficient market knowledge to fulfill the objective.
Finally, the third non-financial measure proposed is new product features released. This can be presented as the number of features released in a given time period, or as the share of old to new product features in newly released products. This measure would contribute to the objective of anticipating customer needs by showing whether the company improves its products based on market trends. If the company is hesitant to introduce new features, it might lose customers to competitors.
Additionally, if the share of new features is meager, customers would not want to buy newly released products. Therefore, measuring new product features released could give Apple an idea of its performance in terms of predicting and responding to customer needs. Combining the three measures discussed here with financial measures related to R&D performance will help to analyze Apples performance in this area effectively.
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