Introduction
This paper reflects on my experiences and role in the teamwork designing, development, and submission of the well-articulated and justified SDS and Customer experience report for the Chicken Treat service-based organization. Adopting Gibbs’s reflective framework will enable me to capture all the major aspects of my experience during the entire SDS and Customer experience report creation and submission (Yaacob et al., 2021). The reflection comprehensively reveals my actions and feelings during the entire organizational analysis and report writing process along with the other three team members, including specific challenges that we faced and solutions we devised to successfully design, create and submit the report. I will then use various marketing and teamwork concepts to evaluate all my experiences, identify strengths and weaknesses, and recommend a well-justified, insightful, and prioritized action plan to advance my performance, behavior, and attitude in a team setting; and realize client goals and self-growth and development.
Description and Feeling of the Role within the Team
The task of designing, developing, and submission of the well-articulated and justified SDS and Customer experience report for Chicken Treat started by creating a group of four student members with comprehensive marketing knowledge and skills. Microsoft Teams empowered me and the other three team members to communicate, meet often, and share files about our various findings on different marketing concepts and SDS of the Chicken Treat service organization. I collaborated with the other team members to divide the team roles based on our capabilities to facilitate smooth interactions during the entire SDS and customer experience report design, creation, and submission. My fellow students assumed the facilitator or leader, devil’s advocate, and timekeeper or notetaker roles, while I assumed the arbitrator or monitor team role.
Our first disagreement occurred during the choice of the service-based company for the SDS and customer service analysis and report creation. Everyone shared a different service organization via Microsoft Teams and offered different marketing reasons for their choices. I understood that observing team functioning and initiating often discussions on team processes especially during a brew of conflict or a sense of tension was my duty as an arbitrator. I started by appreciating our team’s diversity and inclusion capability, appreciated everyone for their suggestion, and reminded us of the team’s shared purpose and desire for consensus decision-making. Everyone has done substantial research on the SDS and customer service, making it hard for them to discard them easily. To solve the interpersonal conflict on which service-based company the team should adopt for the report, I clarified the arguments of each party and proposed a collaborative approach to resolving the dispute. All the team members participated by giving opinions about the best option for the company based on the report instructions. We reached an agreement and selected Chicken Treat because it met all the report requirements: a service-based company with a physical (brick-and-mortar) store where all members could undertake a mystery shop survey and evaluate various SDS and customer service elements.
I acted as a team cheerleader as we participated actively in researching and sharing information about Chicken Treat’s SDS and customer service via Microsoft Teams to understand and design the company background and product sections of the SDS and Customer service report. Every team member also visited Chicken Treat’s physical store to undertake a mystery shop survey and evaluate if the service company’s SDS resulted in satisfied customers. We also incorporated academic research and literature to understand Chicken Treat’s SDS and customer service and write a well-articulated report about the same. I collaborated with other team members to analyze the results of the four mystery shopper surveys conducted by each team member to determine the company’s quality of products serviced to customers, customers’ interactions with employees, waiting time during the services delivery processes like order processing and billing, customer satisfaction, physical ambiance and cleanness, and other key SDS aspects. We also collaborated in designing and developing the report as every member shared in writing a substantial part of the report before we compiled them into the neatly required final SDS report. Although a little challenge occurred during compiling of the report due different writing competencies of the members, we relied on interdependence and shared goal team dynamics to reach an agreement on the final structural design of the report, proofread it, and submitted it as per the assignment requirements.
The fact that the team was supposed to evaluate a real service-based company scared me because I could not figure out how we could gather information from the physical store and combine it with literature to generate such a well-articulated report. Although I have completed small assignments in a team of two or three members, I was anxious about completing the entire process of designing, developing, and submitting the well-articulated report in a team of four people as I anticipated more disagreements and disruptions emanating from our different perceptions and points of view. However, working in the team, collaborating in undertaking various report activities, having often meetings and file sharing via Microsoft Teams, and other team interactions was both exciting and challenging. I could sense the tension in the other team members during various interpersonal disagreements, and relieved after the successful collaborative mitigation of such conflicts. Completing the report within the set timeframes brought tremendous happiness and joy to me and my fellow team members. I felt a sense of achievement after completing and submitting the report, and I believe the other three members felt the same based on their comments during our last meeting after the successful completion of the entire process.
Evaluation of Actions, Behavior, and Role in The Team
The entire Chicken Treat’s SDS and customer service report designing, development, and submission exposed me to numerous novel skills, including effective communication and influencing and persuasion skills acquired through interactions with team members, and Chicken Treat’s customers and frontline employees during my mystery shopper survey. Working as the team’s arbitrator exposed me to challenges such as engaging the other members in various collaborations and discussions to solve interpersonal conflicts and disagreements, and also shaped my cheerleading skills (Manata et al., 2021). This role equipped me with conflict resolution, problem-solving, and decision-making skills. I also developed my active listening and rapport-building, organizational and planning, influencing and persuasion, and reliability skills at all the steps of report designing and creating along with my fellow team members (Braun et al., 2020). I also discovered that upholding positive team dynamics such as seamless collaboration, transparent and effective communication, and others empowers the team to accomplish their shared goals by collaboratively working towards them (Aquino et al., 2022). High creativity expressed by all the team members during our report designing and creation process shows that good team dynamics generate prime environments for creativity and innovation.
Although I experienced various challenges in completing the report alongside my fellow team members, I was able to convert my theoretical marketing knowledge into practical use by matching the marketing concepts with the actual practices of the Chicken Treat service-based organization. Interacting with comprehensive information about Chicken Treat information and its product delivery enabled me to comprehend the importance of incorporating enhancing and facilitating supplementary services to core products. Facilitating supplementary services like appropriate information, order-taking, payment, billing, and others aid in the consumption of the core products which constitute chicken and other foods at Chicken Treat (Ahmad et al., 2022). I also appreciated enhancing supplementary services like hospitality, consultation, safekeeping, and expectations by observing the great value they add to the customers and their experience. The employee and customer script also play a key role in improving customer experience and satisfaction by ensuring that customers receive appropriate support from the frontline employees and other employees (Sands et al., 2021). Although the employee script improves customer satisfaction by offering appropriate customer service and support, it may cause frustration to some customers if the frontline staff members comply with them strictly and fail to modify or customize their responses to the customers.
Using mystery shopper surveys also exposed me to the actual impact of various marketing concepts on customer experience. Although the mystery shopper surveys provided crucial information about Chicken Treat’s SDS and customer service, using choice questions limited respondents from presenting their detailed feeling about the company’s service and their level of satisfaction, limiting information-based recommendations (Blessing & Natter, 2019). Interacting with the physical artifacts, ambiance, interior and exterior outlay, employees, and others also exposed me to numerous physical marketing knowledge useful for attracting and retaining more customers (Kandampully et al., 2022). I also learned that using a combination of marketing concepts, including appropriate core and supplementary services; use of appropriate frontline employee and consumer scripts; choosing an appropriate location and generating ambiance, artifacts, outlay, logos, and others; and improving customer service by avoiding or eliminating potential and existing critical incidents, wait times, bottlenecks and other frustrating moments for customers can result in effective SDS and exceptional consumer experience.
Overall, the team members and I exhibited outstanding behaviors and actions during the entire report designing, generation, and submission process, resulting in appropriate improvement recommendations. Some of such recommendations include implementing novel technological solutions like online order-taking to reduce long queues and wait times; and introducing novel training and development programs on consistent service quality, food handling, and safety, exceptional customer service, product knowledge, and others to hasten service processes. I also performed my team role as an arbitrator exceptionally well, confirming my substantial knowledge and skills in marketing concepts and team dynamics (Braun et al., 2020). However, the use of simple mystery shopper surveys with choices limited our interactions with customers by limiting their opinions about their service experiences at the Chicken Treat service organization (Blessing & Natter, 2019). Therefore, improving my marketing research skills and adopting behaviors that support teamwork and collaboration can improve my experiences and results in my future encounters with similar situations.
Recommendations
The information deficiency that I experienced during the mystery shopper survey indicated a gap in my marketing knowledge, requiring me to invest more in learning about appropriate questions that can extract more detailed information necessary for improving customer service and experience without creating any misunderstandings (Blessing & Natter, 2019). I need to research better ways of conducting mystery shopper surveys, appropriate questions to use, and other marketing research tools that can complement it during similar exposures in the future. Improving my marketing research capabilities is feasible and cost-effective al I will only need several secondary sources of information about mystery shopper surveys and their corresponding information without any need for training. Although engaging in comprehensive research on various customer satisfaction or service assessment strategies might be time-consuming, it constitutes the most suitable way to improve my customer analysis competencies and knowledge and generate sustained change in my customer service undertakings and recommendations to various clients in the future.
I also need to improve my teamwork and collaboration competencies to improve my potential success in marketing concepts and assignments during my actual professional practice in the future. Although I exhibited substantial knowledge of team dynamics and team collaboration skills such as problem-solving capabilities, effective communication, persuasion, and others, I experienced challenges guiding the team in collaboration conflict and disagreement-solving processes. Learning and practicing appropriate teamwork and collaboration practices such as practicing communication, remaining open to novel ideas, giving support and receiving help from others, building trust in others, learning to respect the opinions of other people, celebrating small wins, and upholding excitement and humility will advance my team participation skills (Braun et al., 2020). This action proves feasible and valuable as it will improve my collaboration competencies for better marketing, career, and social constructive relationships in the future.
Conclusion
The reflection on the design, development, and submission of Chicken Treat’s SDS report confirms my substantial knowledge of marketing concepts and team involvement and participation skills. Some of these marketing concepts include offering prominent customer experience via appropriate core services and products with corresponding facilitating and enhancing supplementary services; using appropriate employees to serve customers and combing them with appropriate flexibility to avoid frustrating some customers. Maintaining attractive physical evidence via appropriate exterior and interior store decorations, artifacts, ambiance, employees, logos, and others that complement the brand image and value to customers also constitutes an important marketing aspect. However, I need to improve my mystery shopper surveys by including more elaborative questions that can lead to a better understanding of the customers and recommend improve service, support, and experience improvements to clients in the future. Learning and practicing appropriate team dynamics and collaboration practices will also generate sustainable improvements in my career by enabling me to interact better in the future.
References
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