Customer: A customer is someone who makes use or receives of the products or services of an individual or organization.
Types of Customers
Customers can be classified into two main groups: internal and external. Internal customers work for the organisation, possibly in another department or another branch. External customers are essentially the general public..
Internal Customers
* People working in different departments or branches of the supplyer's organisation
External Customers
* Individuals
* Businesses or businesspeople, including suppliers, bankers and competitors.
* NGOs, Government Bodies, Voluntary Organisations.
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Needs and Expectations
Customer needs may be defined as the facilities or services a customer requires to achieve specific goals or objectives. Needs are generally non-negotiable, but may be optional or of varying importance to the customer. In any transaction, customers seek value-for-money, and will often consider a range of vendors' offers before settling on a purchase.
Customer expectations are based on perceived values of facilities or services as applied to specific needs. Expectations are influenced by cultural values, advertising, marketing, and other communications, both with the supplier and with other sources. Expectations are negotiable and modifiable.
Both customer needs and expectations may be determined through interviews, surveys, conversations or other methods of collecting information. Customers at times do not have a clear understanding of their needs. Assisting in determining needs is a valuable service to the customer. In the process, expectations may be set or adjusted to correspond to known product capabilities or service levels.
Consumers are individuals or households that consume goods and services generated within the economy.
A consumer is assumed to have a budget which can be spent on a range of goods and services available on the market. Under the assumption of rationality , the budget allocation is chosen according to the preference of the consumer, i.e. to maximize his or her utility function.
A community is a collection of living things that share an environment , so forming a recognizable group.
(1) hunters and gatherers,
(2) simple agricultural,
(3) advanced agricultural,
(4) industrial.[3]
Fred Cox, and his co-authors (1970) suggest that there are three kinds of human communities:
* Communities of geographic location
* Communities as organisations
* Communities of shared culture
"sense of community":
1) membership,
2) influence,
3) integration and fulfillment of needs, and
4) shared emotional connection.
Community building and organizing
1. Pseudo-community: Where participants are "nice with each other", playing-safe, and presenting what they feel is the most favourable sides of their personalities.
2. Chaos: When people move beyond the inauthenticity of pseudo-community and feel safe enough to present their "shadow" selves. This stage places great demands upon the facilitator for greater leadership and organisation, but Peck believes that "organisations are not communities", and this pressure should be resisted.
3. Emptying: This stage moves beyond the atempts to fix, heal and convert of the chaos stage, when all people become capable of acknowledging their own woundedness and brokenness, common to us all as human beings. Out of this emptying comes
4. Authentic community: the process of deep respect and true listening for the needs of the other people in this community. This stage Peck believes can only be described as "glory" and reflects a deep yearning in every human soul for compassionate understanding from one's fellows.
Types of community
Location
The most common usage of the word "community" indicates a large group living in close proximity. Examples of local community include:
* A municipality is an administrative local area generally composed of a clearly defined territory and commonly referring to a town or village. Although large cities are also municipalities, they are often thought of as a collection of communities, due to their diversity.
* A neighborhood is a geographically localized community, often within a larger city or suburb.
* A planned community is one that was designed from scratch and grew up more or less following the plan. Several of the world's capital cities are planned cities, notably Washington, D.C., in the United States, Canberra in Australia, and BrasÃlia in Brazil. It was also common during the European colonization of the Americas to build according to a plan either on fresh ground or on the ruins of earlier Amerindian cities.
For more details on this topic, see Community of place .
Identity
In some contexts, "community" indicates a group of people with a common identity other than location. Members often interact regularly. Common examples in everyday usage include:
* A "professional community" is a group of people with the same or related occupations. Some of those members may join a professional society, making a more defined and formalized group. These are also sometimes known as communities of practice .
* A virtual community is a group of people primarily or initially communicating or interacting with each other by means of information technologies, typically over the Internet, rather than in person. These may be either communities of interest, practice or communion. (See below.) Research interest is evolving in the motivations for contributing to online communities.
For more details on this topic, see Community of interest .
Overlaps
Some communities share both location and other attributes. Members choose to live near each other because of one or more common interests.
* A retirement community is designated and at least usually designed for retirees and seniors –- often restricted to those over a certain age, such as 55. It differs from a retirement home, which is a single building or small complex, by having a number of autonomous households.
* An intentional community is a deliberate residential community with a much higher degree of social interaction than other communities. The members of an intentional community typically hold a common social, political or spiritual vision and share responsibilities and resources. Intentional communities include Amish villages, ashrams, cohousing, communes, ecovillages , housing cooperatives, kibbutzim, and land trusts.
"There can be no vulnerability without risk; there can be no community without vulnerability; there can be no peace, and ultimately no life, without community."[23]
Formula 1: Shared emotional connection = contact + high-quality interaction
Formula 2: High-quality interaction = (events with successful closure - ambiguity ) x (event valence x sharedness of the event) + amount of honor given to members - amount of humiliation.
http://www.wam.umd.edu/~stwright/psych/sense-of-community.html
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