Lens Crafters Company came into existence in1983 and since then it has successfully been a unique company in the vision care industry. The company has a vision of giving full sight to the world through making every of its customers see one after the other. Over the years, the company has advanced from manual systems of operation to an automated system and hence meeting their major objective of prioritizing customer satisfaction.
Lens crafters’ Operations Strategy and How the Organization Seeks to Gain a Competitive Advantage regarding Sustainability
The mission statement of Lens Crafters focuses on being the leading company in the industry through the creation of customers who are always customers to the company even when not offering the service. That is to be the leading regarding customer service and providing quality, efficient and effective services. Lens Crafters is aiming at being able to lead to training and supporting leaders and associates who are skillful in offering quality eye services to customers in the shortest time possible that is in an hour. Lens Crafter Company is determined to improve the services offered to the human eye through several ways. First is by being passionate about the human eyes through developing a true commitment to caring for the human eye.
Ideally, this means that the company trains its employees so that people with eye problems need handling with a lot of care and with a passion demonstrating the willingness to assist them out of their problems. This gives Lens Crafters an advantage in the market because most of the eye service companies have a specialist with a poor morale at work hence lacks the deep passion of satisfying the customer. Secondly, is through being progressive in improving the experience of an eye service. This means Lens Crafters Company is committed to ensuring that the experience customers have during the time of service delivery improves now and then (Berry& Berry, 2016). The experience is not only on how the customers are handled by the company’s opticians but also eradication of the negative physical experience such as pain the customer gets during the process of eye service.
Therefore, this gives Lens Crafters an advantage in the market in that most companies do not fully exploit technological advancement in creating a friendly experience to the customer during eye service. Thirdly, is being able to create a personal relationship with the customer even after successfully offering the eye service. Lens Crafters company aims at achieving this through ensuring that a profile of customer contact is created so as to be able to know the progress of the customer from time to time even after the eye service. As a result, this will enable the company to be able to increase its network all over the Canada, Puerto Rico, and the US. In particular, this is a special strategy for Lens Crafters Company since most companies do not keep a personal relationship with the customers and therefore this gives Lens Crafters an advantage in the market of eye servicing.
How Operation Management Activities Affect the Customer Experience
Lens Crafters have been able to gain market advantage over its competitors because of putting in place systems of art that ensure that the customer gets services in an effective and efficient way so that the customer satisfaction is met in all the possible ways. For example, during the recruitment process of employees Lens Crafters company used a system in ensuring they employ only competent staffs so as to as to have a specialist who is cooperative to the people visiting the company offices for eye services. Consequently, this ensures that staffs working for the company have enough skills on their line of employment and can cooperate with customers to solve eye issue. As a result, this creates a good environment for the customers to explain their issues since they will be addressing to a specialist who understands them. In addition, the great investment the company has made on eye machinery enables the customer to be able to have a good experience during the time of service.
One of the challenges Lens Crafters is facing is how to structure the various processes it is planning to add to its supply chain because the company’s network and size have increased. The size of the company has increased through consolidation with other organization of vision care. The major challenge that came with consolidation is that it is complex to integrate the data from the new organization into the already existing systems in Lens Crafters Company. The solution to this challenge is that Lens Crafters are supposed to be modifying the data and information of the new organization so that it is compatible with the data format in the company’s systems. This makes merging of data easy and quickly understandable. In the case of staffs of the new company, Lens Crafters should first train them on how the company operates so that when they come in, they do not slow down the operation processes.
Another challenge the company faces is that since the company is large, it had the obligation of providing to its customers at an instantaneous rate without necessarily make the operational processes too long and difficult for the customer especially that the company uses a manual system in entering its data. The solution to this challenge is the introduction of a new clear system that automates the inventories of the company so that customers can easily understand how the services offered to them are charged (Johnston& Kong, 2011).
Lens crafters’ Value Chain and Its Effectiveness to Operations regarding Quality, Value Creation, and Customer Satisfaction
The value chain at Lens Crafters involves a flow process of work, which starts with prescription entering, then appropriate frame selection, then configuration of the lens and finally entering the optical measurements. These above steps occur independently and therefore creating lenses of high quality and value (Grönroos, 2011). Furthermore, the steps become few, simple, and fast therefore satisfying many customers. Therefore, because of the well-designed value chain in LensCrafters, the outcome has always been products of high quality, high value and satisfying many customers hence it becomes possible to rate the value in a very effective manner for the company.
The Different Types of Performance Measurements that can be used to Measure Lens crafters’ Service Delivery System Design
The various ways of measuring performance include close monitoring through supervision, automation of operational processes and measuring the level of customer satisfaction of service delivered to them (Poppendieck, 2011). The two way of measuring performance applied to Lens Crafters system design of service delivery include prioritizing customer satisfaction and automation of the operation systems. Firstly, the most important aspect when evaluating the performance of Lens Crafters is the prioritizing of the customer’s interest so that they receive services of high quality and at the shortest time possible. Placing the satisfaction of the customer as the priority enhances efficient performance in the company.
In particular, this is possible through placing of systems in the company that ensures very high levels of transparency to its users at all the levels of operations. Moreover, Lens Crafters can use a high level of technical expertise and automation rarely used by any other vision care facility. Consequently, this will make the process of operation in the company very fast and effective to its customers and employees. Every process in the company needs automation from the process of recruiting people suitable for the various positions of management to the process of sales and distribution streamlining. The automation of all processes in the company makes the operation process hustle free and eradicates any chances of abnormalities that make operation, sales, and distribution processes slow and ineffective.
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The Different Types of Technologies Applied to Len scrafters’ Service Operations and Evaluate How the Technologies Strengthen the Value Chain
Lens Crafters have been able to apply various technologies to enhance their operation, sales, and the distribution processes within the company. First, the company has been able to use the Bean store technology that enables it to centralize its mechanism of sale. This technology enables the company to be having once machine responsible for sales within all its stores instead of having a sales machine in every store (Baden-Fuller& Haefliger, 2013).In addition, the company uses an automatic POS system in keeping the inventories of the company instead of manually inputting the prices of items. In particular, this helped in creating an interacting system with customers so that all the sales done are transparent.
References
Baden-Fuller, C., & Haefliger, S. (2013). Business models and technological innovation. Long range planning, 46(6), 419-426.
Berry, L. L., & Berry, L. L. (2016). Revisiting “big ideas in services marketing” 30 years later. Journal of Services Marketing, 30(1), 3-6.
Grönroos, C. (2011). A service perspective on business relationships: The value creation, interaction and marketing interface. Industrial marketing management, 40(2), 240-247.
Johnston, R., & Kong, X. (2011). The customer experience: a road-map for improvement. Managing Service Quality: An International Journal, 21(1), 5-24.
Poppendieck, M. (2011). Principles of lean thinking. IT Management Select, 18, 1-7.
