Southside College (SC) offers a wide range of courses aimed at vocational and professional qualifications. It has been operating for over 30 years now, and is well-established. It has been accredited as an approved training provided by a number of the qualification-awarding bodies.
Although it competes with non-for-profit universities and colleges in some of its markets, SC is a limited company. Throughout its history, SC has always traded profitably.
In recent years, there have been a number of new entrants into the professional qualifications market. However, to date, SC has managed to retain the largest market share. SC's students consistently achieve higher pass rates than the national averages for the qualifications they are sitting.
SC has always concentrated on the quality of the teaching on its courses and the accompanying study materials. In recent years, however, a number of SC's competitors have begun to offer their students online tutorials to supplement their taught courses and these have proved very popular. SC's customer services team is receiving an increasing number of enquiries from prospective students about whether SC offers similar online tutorials. SC is developing its own online tutorials, but the development process is taking longer than had been hoped.
SC's management team have never been convinced of the need for market research or customer research, arguing that the company has always achieved its sales targets and has always been profitable. Similarly, they point out that SC has established a good reputation and a position as a market leader, despite investing relatively little in marketing activities.
Historically, SC has had a very low rate of employee turnover, but in recent years this has begun to increase as some of SC's tutors have left to join the new entrants in the market. This increase in employee turnover has concerned SC's management team.
Accordingly, SC's management team are keen to identify the critical success factors which will enable SC to maintain its performance levels in the future.
Required
(a) Identify four Critical Success Factors which it would be appropriate to use at SC.
(b) For each Critical Success Factor you have identified, recommend, with reasons, two Key Performance Indicators which could be used to support that Critical Success Factor.