| Course | BUSI 616 Total Quality Management (BUSI616) |
|---|---|
| Module/Week | 3 |
| Assignment | Customer Satisfaction |
| Paper type | Short APA paper on internal and external customers |
| Length | about 536 words, 2 double-spaced pages plus title page and references. Course guide: approximately 500 words with a title page and reference list in current APA format, citing at least 2 scholarly articles for a total of 3 references, with biblical integration |
| Format | APA 7 student paper |
| Points | 50 |
| School | Liberty University Online |
| Program | MBA |
| Where it sits | Module/Week 3 in Liberty's published BUSI 616 course guide; current sections can differ |
| Updated | October 2026 |
Free sample paper for BUSI 616 Week 3
The Dentist, the Patient and the Next Bench: Internal and External Customer Satisfaction at a Dental Laboratory
[Student Name]
School of Business, Liberty University
BUSI 616: Total Quality Management
Customer Satisfaction
[Instructor Name]
[Date]
The dental laboratory and its practices are composites standing in for the organization a student selects; the textbook, Scripture and studies cited are real, and the requirements follow Liberty's public course guide for BUSI 616.
The Dentist, the Patient and the Next Bench: Internal and External Customer Satisfaction at a Dental Laboratory
Who the Customer Is
Shenandoah Dental Arts, the composite laboratory chosen in Module/Week 1, has two external customers. The dentist orders the crown, pays for it and judges it on fit and turnaround; the patient wears it and judges it on comfort and appearance. The two can disagree: a dentist may accept a slightly open contact to save a second appointment, while the patient later notices food trapping between teeth. The laboratory serves both, so it needs to hear from both. Goetsch and Davis (2016) also stress the internal customer, the next person or unit in the process who receives one's work. Inside the laboratory, that chain runs as follows.
| Station | Its internal customer | What the customer needs |
|---|---|---|
| Case intake and scanning desk | Design technicians | A complete prescription and a clean scan of the margins |
| Design | Milling | A design file with confirmed margin and contact settings |
| Milling | Porcelain and staining | A restoration with intact margins |
| Porcelain and staining | Final check | Correct shade and contacts |
Is Satisfaction Valued?
Shenandoah values dentists' satisfaction: owners call unhappy practices personally. Internal handoffs receive far less attention, although most remakes begin there. When a porcelain technician receives a milled crown with a chipped margin, the usual response is to repair it quietly rather than tell the miller, so the same fault returns the next day. No one measures how often work is passed back between stations. That imbalance is costly, because Anderson et al. (1994) found that higher quality raised customer satisfaction and that satisfaction in turn supported profitability. A dentist's satisfaction is built four stations upstream, at a desk the dentist never sees.
How Needs Are Identified
External needs are identified mainly through the prescription form. Afsharzand et al. (2006) surveyed U.S. dental laboratories and found that many reported a lack of communication in dentists' work authorizations about choice of material, porcelain and margin design. Shenandoah sees the same gaps, and technicians fill them by guessing. Internal needs are identified only informally, when a downstream technician walks a case back. Neither channel records patients' needs at all. Remake slips, the third source, record only that a crown failed, not why, so they cannot show which unmet need caused the failure. A better system would add a reason code to every remake slip, a short call to the dentist's office for any case with a missing shade or margin note and a brief question on patient comfort in the laboratory's annual survey of practices.
Who Is Empowered
At present only the owner can delay a case to call a dentist. The intake desk should be empowered to hold a case with an incomplete prescription and request the missing details, and each station should be able to return work to the previous one without penalty. Design technicians, who see every scan, should also have authority to request a rescan from the dentist's office directly rather than designing around a poor margin. These powers would shift decisions to the people closest to the problem, which Goetsch and Davis treat as the heart of empowerment, and would make internal needs visible instead of absorbed.
Biblical Integration
Writing to Rome, Paul compares believers to the members of a single body, each with a different function and all belonging to one another (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016, Romans 12:4-5). The comparison fits a laboratory well. The scanning desk, the designers and the porcelain technicians do different work, but none of them succeeds alone, and a technician who treats the next bench as a customer is practicing the kind of mutual service Paul describes. A laboratory that honors that dependence serves the dentist and the patient better.
References
Afsharzand, Z., Rashedi, B., & Petropoulos, V. C. (2006). Communication between the dental laboratory technician and dentist: Work authorization for fixed partial dentures. Journal of Prosthodontics, 15(2), 123-128. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1532-849X.2006.00086.x
Anderson, E. W., Fornell, C., & Lehmann, D. R. (1994). Customer satisfaction, market share, and profitability: Findings from Sweden. Journal of Marketing, 58(3), 53-66. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299405800304
English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)
Goetsch, D. L., & Davis, S. B. (2016). Quality management for organizational excellence: Introduction to total quality (8th ed.). Pearson.
What the BUSI 616 Week 3 instructions ask
Students reach the Customer Satisfaction paper in Module/Week 3, after chapters 7 to 9 of Goetsch and Davis, four presentations and a website, and with Discussion Board Forums 3 and 4 also due. Liberty frames the task as a reflection on who the customer is within the selected organization. Four questions follow: does the organization place importance on satisfying both internal and external customers, how are each group's needs identified, and who is empowered to meet them? About 500 words is the target. The paper names two scholarly articles alongside the textbook, three sources in all, applies biblical integration and needs a title page and APA references. Like each of the other short BUSI 616 papers, it carries 50 points.
How this BUSI 616 Week 3 example is built
After naming the customers, the sample uses a table to trace the internal customer chain, showing what each station needs from the one before it. A section on importance contrasts the laboratory's attention to dentists with its neglect of internal handoffs, using Anderson, Fornell and Lehmann's evidence that satisfaction feeds profitability. The needs section draws on Afsharzand, Rashedi and Petropoulos's survey, in which many laboratories reported that dentists' work authorizations lacked key design information, to show how external needs go unidentified. The empowerment section recommends giving the scanning desk authority to hold an incomplete case. A short reflection on serving one another as parts of one body supplies the biblical integration.
BUSI 616 Week 3 grading rubric: where the points go
Strong Customer Satisfaction papers answer every question in the prompt for the student's own organization: who the internal and external customers are, whether both are valued, how needs are found and who is empowered to act. Graders reward a clear grasp of the internal customer concept from the reading, specific methods of identifying needs rather than "surveys," and an honest assessment where the organization falls short. Evidence from scholarly sources should support claims about why satisfaction matters or how needs are missed. Biblical integration counts when it shapes the analysis of how people serve each other. The remaining points cover length near 500 words, organization, grammar and APA formatting of the title page, citations and references.
BUSI 616 Week 3 help: mistakes that cost points
The weakest papers define the internal customer and then describe only external customers. Show the internal chain concretely: who hands work to whom, and what the receiver needs. When explaining how needs are identified, name the actual mechanism, such as a prescription form, a call log or a remake slip, and say what it misses. On empowerment, answer with a role and a decision that role can make. Keep claims about profitability tied to a study rather than stated as obvious. Use the Week 1 problem as the thread: if remakes are the issue, show where customer needs are lost before the remake happens. And keep within roughly 500 words; the guide's questions can be answered fully at that length.
Related BUSI 616 sample papers
Other BUSI 616 weeks
- BUSI 616 Week 1: Deming vs. Crosby Philosophies
- BUSI 616 Week 2: Partners, Alliances and Culture
- BUSI 616 Week 4: Training Needs Analysis
- BUSI 616 Week 5: Quality Tool: Remake Pareto Chart
- BUSI 616 Week 6: PDCA Cycle for Open Margins
- BUSI 616 Week 7: Change Management Strategy
- BUSI 616 Week 8: TQM Presentation: First-Time Fit
More MBA sample papers
- BUSI 610 Week 3: Forum 2 Part 1: Managing Dependence
- BUSI 613 Week 3: Article Review 3: Shared Information
- BUSI 614 Week 3: Qualitative Assignment 2: Surveys
- BUSI 615 Week 3: Forum 2: Does ERP Pay Off?
BUSI 616 Week 3 questions, answered
What is the BUSI 616 Customer Satisfaction assignment?
Due in Module/Week 3 for 50 points, it is a reflection of roughly 500 words on who the customer is in the selected organization, whether internal and external customers' satisfaction matters, how their needs are identified and who is empowered to meet them.
Where can I find a free BUSI 616 Week 3 sample paper?
Scroll up for a full Week 3 Customer Satisfaction paper written for BUSI 616; it maps a dental laboratory's internal customer chain and its external customers, with evidence and biblical integration.
What is an internal customer in TQM?
Any person or department that receives work from another inside the organization; in TQM, each station is expected to learn and meet the needs of the next one, just as the firm serves outside customers.
How are customer needs identified?
Through structured channels such as order forms, complaint and return records, interviews, surveys and direct conversation, each of which captures some needs and misses others, so firms usually combine several.
Does customer satisfaction improve profitability?
Research using a national satisfaction index found that quality raised customer satisfaction, which in turn was associated with higher economic returns, supporting investment in satisfaction.
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