For over thirty years, Prof Adré Schreuder’s career has been closely entwined with the Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences (EMS) at UP. From 1988, when he accepted a position as lecturer at EMS, rising in the 1990s to Head of the Department, then as founder of the Faculty’s partnership research company, Consulta Research, and since 1999 as Extraordinary Professor, he has made an invaluable contribution to the Faculty’s knowledge base. Read more about his “career dream”, his view of the future of education, the skills that will be in demand in the world of work and the role of universities in adequately equipping students with the new skills set.

 

A: I have been the Head of the Department of Marketing Management from 1994 to 1998 and subsequently started a partnership company with the then Business Enterprises of Pretoria in 1999. The university wanted to retain my experience in Marketing Management, specifically relating to marketing research and customer satisfaction. I have been invited to the appointment as extraordinary professor since 1999.

 

More recently, I sold the company that I founded in 1999, and I am now in the process of setting up a new private sector-funded Chair in Experience Management at the Department of Marketing Management. 

 

I continue to be a hybrid academic-cum-practitioner and the Chair would be a career dream culmination of finding a closer relationship between academia and the private sector.

 

Furthermore, I would be invited to do some guest lectures on the master’s and PhD programmes offered in the Department.

 

A: Ever since I started in academia, I was drawn to the university-practitioner relationship, particularly the notion of an entrepreneurial university. The most enjoyable and rewarding aspect of the position is to prove critics, whom I call “practitioners-believing-all-academics-are-too-theoretical” wrong and experience their admiration and respect for the unique place of science in the real word. For me it is about bringing science to the world – my science specifically, being the science of the customer and experiences.

 

A: My areas of specialisation developed over two decades as a learning and post-doctoral journey. It started off as a specialist market researcher and combining that with services marketing and discovering my career interest – customer satisfaction measurement. 

 

I fulfilled a career dream to found the first ever Customer Satisfaction Index in South Africa in 2012 – called SAcsi (of which I am still Chair of the Governance Committee). I have been specialising in customer satisfaction measurement and management during most of my career in the last five years as the science developed more into experience management that includes customer experience.

 

A: At heart an optimist, I see a very critical role for tertiary education and research in the post-COVID-19 era, especially since this timeframe in history would be remembered for the time when false news and conspiracy theories became more dangerous than the actual pandemic. 

 

The world would turn (and already is turning) to robust and respected academic researchers and scientists to provide clear, unambiguous answers to many of the current-day challenges in the world. In my science it is specifically business’s better understanding of how customers want to relate and engage with them in the technological cold and impersonal environment. This also brings an immense responsibility for researchers and scientists to practise our science with the most rigorous and meticulous care and precision than ever before.

 

A: I have been one of the few voices, albeit getting more and louder, calling for more practical application and especially problem handling and design thinking. Another important aspect is to be more of a hybrid than a specialist – it could start off with university qualifications and specialisation, but post-graduate and post-university career development are critical to ensure we equip practitioners with the diverse and integrated topics and knowledge required today.

 

A: The science I am specialising in is still in its baby shoes and, as a matter as fact, the body of knowledge on customer experience and experience management is still evolving and being fine-tuned.

 

Gartner did some research a few years ago that reported more than 90% of business leaders believe the most important way to differentiate themselves is through customer experience. In that sense I rate the need for research – specifically more scientific research – to be very high.

 

A: The field of customer experience has been predominantly practitioner-led in the last 15 years. The scientific community has recently (I would say the last ten years) started to acknowledge the need for a separate field of study, and consequently there has been much more customer experience research published in scientific journals. 

 

The following big research questions should be at top of the agenda:

 

A: The Department of Marketing Management celebrated its 50 years of existence at the University of Pretoria in 2020, which is regarded as the leading university in the delivery of well-rounded, sought-after post-graduate students.

 

In this sense, my subject science will see its birth by starting a new Chair in Experience Management in the same way that marketing training started at the University 50 years ago – a Chair that was sponsored through private sector funding and the rest is history. We have been, are and will be the pioneers in our scientific universe.