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This case study allows students to appreciate the value of standard operating procedures in customer management. This case study emphasises the role of employees in delivering superior customer experience. This case study explores many facets of customer experience, reputation, social class membership and standard operating procedures (SOPs). Students will be able to apply theories of customer experience, behavioural psychology and service dimensions relevant to the airline industry. After completing this case study, students will be able to do the following:1. Evaluate the value of SOPs in Customer ManagementThis case study refers to the need for adhering to SOPs to deal with complex situations. Students will be able to evaluate whether compliance to SOPs could have helped Air India avoid the crisis or was it possible that a culture of absolute commitment to customer wellbeing could have prevented the crisis.2. Apply the theory of defensive attribution in customer grievance handling. Discuss if reducing customer effort in getting their problem solved can result in superior customer service.The victim had attributed the blame for not insisting on filing a complaint to the crew. Air India crew had defended their actions or lack of it by stating that they had followed the rule book. Students will be able to appreciate the need for a swift redressal mechanism to protect the self-image and self-esteem of the person/group involved. They will also understand that customer service interactions designed to solve customer problems swiftly and easily can be a very simple dictum to guide all employees in their decision-making while handling a customer complaint.

3. Evaluate the relationship between customer satisfaction and customer experience and examine the value of net promoter score (NPS) to study customer satisfaction.

Air India Airlines was catering to varied customer groups such as the Indian diaspora, large student population pursuing education abroad, first-time flyers and the rising middle class with travel aspirations. Customer expectations vary across segments and change over their lifetime. Airline staff must trace customer corridors and deliver on customer expectation across the touch points that matter to them to ensure meaningful and relevant service delivery. Students will have an opportunity to evaluate the NPS in measuring customer satisfaction and debate whether it is a sufficient metric to guide the organisation on delivering and monitoring customer experience.

4. Examine why reputation risk management and not crisis management should be the focus of Air India in delivering superior customer service because nearly 70%–80% of market value for a company comes from its intangible assets such as brand equity and reputation.

Students will discuss crisis management i.e. handling the threat to reputation after it has occurred and reputation risk management i.e. proactively managing potential threats to its reputation by taking timely actions to avoid or mitigate it. There are three factors (reputation reality gap, changing beliefs and expectation and weak internal coordination) that determine reputational risks. Students can evaluate this model to determine if Air India should address these three factors to manage its reputation proactively.

This case study is set around an incident that happened on 26 November 2022, on Air India flight bound for Delhi from New York when an inebriated 34-year-old man had peed on a 72-year-old woman. The perpetrator of the crime had walked free, and the victim was left dissatisfied with how the cabin crew had handled her ordeal. Air India Airlines was launched in 1932 by industrialist JRD Tata and nationalised in 1953. In 2021, Tata Group acquired the 90-year-old Air India from the Government of India for $2.4bn (INR 18,000 crore) and appointed Campbell Wilson as chief executive officer and managing director. The incident brought to the fore the customer management issues that Wilson had to address. First on the list of Air India’s turnaround plan was delivering “exceptional customer experience”. How was it going to achieve it because the Indian aviation ecosystem lacked infrastructure such as airports, airspace, competition and customer preference-based services? There was also shortage of pilots, engineers, technicians, air-traffic controllers and technocrats to occupy positions within security agencies and regulatory bodies. With Air India’s acquisition, the Tata Group had to find innovative solutions to deal with decades of internal neglect, non-performance and labour union problems. This case study is relevant to address real issues of customer experience, consumer psychology, reputation risk management and standard operating procedures in service management.

This case is suitable for both undergraduate and postgraduate level students of business management. It can also be used for training service personnel of aviation industry.

Teaching notes are available for educators only.

CSS 8: Marketing

In late 2011, Jerry Bertram, vice president and general manager of the fire retardant additives business of Huber Engineered Materials (HEM), a division of family-owned J. M. Huber Corporation, was preparing to present the potential acquisition of the precipitated alumina trihydrate (PATH) business to the environment, health, and safety committee of Huber's corporate board. He had convinced HEM's leadership of PATH's strategic value to their business and the urgency of the acquisition based on PATH's parent company's movement into Chapter 11 bankruptcy and its plans to close the PATH plant.

Winning board approval posed a major challenge. It was unclear whether the plant would remain operational, because HEM would have to enter a shared-services arrangement with PATH's parent company, which continued to use the site. In addition, acquiring PATH would mean integrating its specialized, unionized labor force into Huber, which had very few union workers. Finally, early due diligence had revealed tens of millions of dollars of potential environmental risk on the site. The last issue was particularly critical, given Huber's generations-long history of respect for the environment, and its executives' and directors' reluctance to take on any business with excessive environmental risk.

This case illustrates in depth the family business values that can promote consideration of an ostensibly unconventional and risky strategic move, and enable executives to push for approval of the same, as backed by comprehensive risk assessment and mitigation plans.

CF Industries’ products nitrogen fertilizers are a crucial input to making agriculture productive enough to feed the world. However, its products are undifferentiated commodities. Throughout parts of its history, CF has struggled to be consistently profitable, yet over the last decade it has been very profitable. The case provides an opportunity to examine how CF manages to create value and capture it as profits despite being in a commodity business.

In March 2000 a fire broke out at the Royal Philips Electronics plant, damaging its supply of semiconductor chips. Nokia Corporation and Ericsson LM relied on these chips to produce their cell phones; together they received 40 percent of the plant's chip production. Both companies were about to release new cell phone designs that required the chips. At Nokia, word of the setback spread quickly up the chain of command. Nokia's team, which had a crisis plan in place, sprang into action. With an aggressive, multipronged strategy, Nokia avoided any cell phone production loss. In contrast, the low-level technician who received the information at Ericsson did not notify his supervisors about the fire until early April and had to scramble to locate new sources for the chips. This search delayed production and proved a fatal blow to Ericsson's independent production of mobile phones. Nokia's handling of its supply chain disruption provides a dramatic example of how a company's strategic risk management can alleviate financial disaster and lay the groundwork for success in the future. Perturbations in supply chain management are inevitable, and grow harder and harder to assess as the marketplace becomes more globalized.

Students will learn the following concepts:

United Learning is a family-owned leader in the K-12 supplementary teaching material market. In January 2001, United Learning realized that sales for one of its flagship products, a drug and prevention program, were rapidly deteriorating because the program was not mentioned on a recently released U.S. Department of Education list of recommended products. United Learning must decide on which action to take: regain sales or focus on its other educational products—which are also threatened by changes in the regulatory environment.

This public-sourced case was named the best finance case of 2013 in the 24th annual awards and competition sponsored by The Case Centre. It was designed for and works well in the latter portion of a GEMBA Financial Management and Policies course and in the early stage of a second-year MBA elective Financial Institutions and Markets course. The case is set in mid-2012 as the new co-CEOs of Deutsche Bank are about to speak in an analyst call. Students are the decision makers and have the opportunity to evaluate the various factors affecting a bank's situation in a changing global industry, such as leverage and credit quality, as well as to discuss the implications on Deutsche Bank and the banking sector more broadly of Basel III, the global regulatory reform. The students also have the opportunity to conduct a valuation of the bank. Investors were anxious to know whether the new co-CEOs would discuss the strategy of how Deutsche Bank planned to meet the new regulatory requirements, what effect Basel III would have on the company's profitability, and what lines of business it would focus on going forward in a new banking environment. They also wanted to know more about the benefits of the 2010 majority stake investment in Postbank, a German commercial bank. In class, this discussion also allows for a broader examination of the universal bank model and the role of banks within society.

In February 2018, Jerome Powell had taken over as chair of the FOMC. At first glance, the macroeconomic conditions inherited by Powell appeared favorable for continued stability: unemployment and inflation were low, and the economy had been steadily growing for nearly a decade. Yet despite the appearance of stability, the economy faced significant risks that required the Federal Reserve's attention. Was an uptick in inflation imminent, and if so, should Powell raise rates to limit any inflationary pressure? Or was the economy still operating below capacity, and if so, should the Federal Reserve take a more accommodative stance? To gain perspective, Powell needed to look back at the past fifty years of monetary policy in the United States.