Institutions:
Actions to improve Zeron service structure and overall service
The problem with Zeron that results in customer issues could be a poor clarity with the agents regarding the internal principle of customer service. Thus, ongoing support and guidance could be significant ways of addressing the issues. Additionally, the officers' network on Quality customer service (QCS) could be a helpful platform for sharing as well as dissemination of experiences information regarding the best practice. In that respect, service standards focusing on organizational and business unit platforms, as well as a commitment to principles of internal customers, could be crucial to enhancing the overall service. Thus, considering that no single approach suits an entire organization, each department of the agents requires creating initiatives that are most suited for its staff and circumstances. In that respect, the following is a summary of key actions that could be specified with the agents to enhance service structure and overall service by Zeron.
Organizational level actions
Pro-active support management for the customer service departments.
Use of partnership process between departments to enhance effective response to customer issues.
Need to offer adequate resources to the staff while seeking commitments the internal service improvement.
Improving internal communications that could help the customer service address issues in a consistent manner that avoids giving conflicting feedback to customers.
Acknowledging and encouraging excellence in the internal delivery by teams and individuals.
Commitment to service delivery long-run programs.
Business unit actions
Encouraging teams/units to identify key internal issues that affect service delivery.
Application of Development System and Performance Management to identify training and skill needs for the staff regarding service delivery
Benchmarking and the subsequent surveys for the purpose of enhancing staff satisfaction.
Establishing crucial service cross-teams.
Holding staff panels, joint training or workshops with the internal customers so as to discuss, identify and resolve key issues that could be affecting service delivery.
Development of service commitments and service platform agreements between various departments to avoid situations where departments could fail to support each other in service delivery (Day, Gronn & Salas, 2004).
Steps of creating a customer-centric culture throughout Zeron
The main reason Zeron could have failed to develop a meaningful customer-centric culture that leads to increased complaints could be a result of the following
Lack of interest among the agents’ staff.
The agents’ employees’ lack of understanding regarding expected experience they should deliver.
Lack of a buy-in that is broad-based.
Given the above issues that could be the reason for failed effective service delivery in terms effective service delivery and customer focus, the following are five steps, which may help Zeron achieve the culture.
Build a business case towards customer experience revolution.
Help the executives connect well with customers’ viewpoint.
Seek clear demonstration of the executive’s commitment
Step two: Build customer experience groups to guide the transformation
That could entail bringing new leadership from outside the firm or selecting an effective leader from within. However, regardless of the leader’s origination, the team should
Define the expected customer experience.
Support the customer service teams using virtual colleagues.
Focus on alignment across entire organization.
Step three: Promote understanding of expected experience
Given that Zeron employees could resist change that may not be well understood regarding what is expected, the step could help ensure all the employees identify the experience they should deliver. To achieve that, the company should:
Enhance communication concerning intended experiences’ vision. The employees require a concise, clear description of targets to be achieved as well as how they should attain it.
Sharing the customer experience and success stories. During the early transformation stages, employees require ongoing real examples concerning expected service standards. This is why the company should collect the customer experiences and share success stories regarding those who meet all the expected experience standards.
Step four: Align and rally employees to transformation once they know the expected standards. That should entail the following
As the Company’s personnel are likely to resist the change, describing to the employees why and how they are to benefit from this transformation can be of assistance in breaking some of the resistance.
Featuring the focus customer principles in the corporate communications. There is a need for Zeron to integrate principles of customer experience into the corporate communications including briefings in meetings. In that view, repetition and consistency are key.
Regular celebrations for employees who are customer-centric. Visible customer-centric employees’ celebrations would demonstrate the commitment of the organization to that transformation.
Step five: Embed the principles of customers’ experience into service delivery. That is because employees could be ready to change their conduct, but need ongoing guidance plus training and reinforcement. During this step, the company should:
Offer training on the ways of delivering the experiences that are intended. That means the company should revise its training programs introducing specific contents that help employees deliver their intended new experience.
Update the competency models of the employees to include the principles of customer centricity. The company should revise the models of competency to include the behaviors that are relevant to the expected experience.
Integrate the customer centricity principles into onboarding and hiring. With the existing employees on the way to becoming customer-centric, the company should turn its attention to the future employees.
Redesign employees’ incentives and reward the customer centricity.
With the above steps, Zeron can achieve a customer-centric culture in its operations as well as those outsourced to other agents.
Actions to build better customer support and customer relationship management
Building better customer support and CRM would entail addressing key issues within Zeron. The key reasons for the failure could have been
Organizational change
Inertia/policies
Little CRM understanding
CRM synthesize several existing principles emanating from the relationship marketing and the wider issues regarding customer-focused administration. Thus, CRM systems offer infrastructure that enhances long-run relationship creation with customers. The companies are entering to compete within a market weaken solid and existing ones such as Zeron in this case because of the new manners of conceiving and doing businesses. A single factor which has brought all these developments is the evolution and change of technology. Due to that reality, the concept of CRM has also evolved in a manner that recently it is viewed as crucial to maintaining sustainable customer relationships (Chatham et al., 2000).
Thus, maintaining an excellent customer relationship would be crucial to the business success. In that view, the management and building the relationship would entail relationship marketing, tend to be a crucial approach in marketing. That is because CRM use is becoming more and more significant to improve the lifetime worth of customers. Hence, there is a need for Zeron to effectively identifying the customers’ needs, and offer services whose value has been added as that could enhance customers’ satisfaction and reduce the complaints on poor services. Thus, the company should attach enormous significance to the eCRM (electronic relationship management) that focus on the customers but not only on the products and services, meaning, but it should also consider the customers’ demands in all the business aspects, making sure there is customer satisfaction.
Specific actions to improve the overall morale, spirit of service and commitment of Zeron’s employees
Morale is a crucial intangible concept referring to the supportive and positive feeling of a group of an organization that employees belong to. It also refers to individual members’ feelings shared with the others, for instance, purpose, self-worth, one’s pride, and trust in organization and leadership success. The morale is highly influenced from top downward (by leadership), then from bottom up. Also, the leaders have the capacity to influence and shape the culture of an organization by being the role models, rewarding employees and effective resources’ allocation. Further, the manner of recruitment, promotion and termination could influence employees’ morale, spirit, and commitment. There should also be an effort by Zeron’s leadership to promote a trusting environment, which exists when the management fulfills its promises and is consistent in its actions. Also, Zeron’s leaders can improve employees’ spirit, commitment, and morale by fostering openness, being authentic and accessible role models (Upadhyay & Anu, 2012). Thus, by developing communication that is effective, building cohesiveness within teams as well as being in a position to energize would be essential to enhancing Zeron employees’ morale and spirit.
Thus, Zeron’s leaders should listen more, set expectations that are clear, have more interaction with the staffs, communicate clearly the organization’s plans for managing changes, assign tasks based on the skills and not office policies, provide more responsibilities to employees, hold employees accountable and overcome change resistance, as well as defer with people with higher expertise. Also, the morale could be enhanced through job enhancement and enrichment, new knowledge learning, and ensuring reports are prepared for the management are as well sent to the staffs.
Further, there are other solutions that the company can apply to improve the employees’ commitment and spirit as well as morale. Thus, there is a need for management to attract the right skills and talent to the Company through behavior and skill hiring. Also, best practices would include looking for the best, focusing on customers and hiring for the passion. Additionally, for an organization’s spirit to be improved, each individual’s moral should be improved. To best achieve that, Zeron’s managers’ should lead by example. With that, the servant leaders make sure that the needs of other peoples are addressed effectively, and that could help improve the staff commitment to solving the customer issues.
Morale of the Zeron’s employees could also be psychological disposition and subject to work, environment, corporate culture and economic factors. Thus, improving it requires conducting an opinion survey. Then the company should follow up the survey results to implement action plans that ensure that the top management enhances trust building within the organization. That is because the attitude of the employees is a very valuable tool to the organization and the surveys on employees’ issues offers information that can be applied to improving productivity, morale, and commitment. By identifying employees’ attitude towards the customer service and issues, the management can effectively decide on suitable actions to increase the job satisfaction that is crucial to its service delivery. Finally, the management should ensure ongoing company-wide and departmental meetings are convened to identify key issues affecting employing that could be hindering effective service delivery and their morale (Usmani, Kumari & Hussain. 2013).
References
Chatham, B., Orlov, L. M., Howard, E., Worthen, B. and Coutts, A. (2000). The Customer Conversation. Cambridge: Forrester Research Inc.
Day, D. V., Gronn, P., and Salas, E. (2004). Leadership capacity in teams. Leadership Quarterly, 15, 857-880.
Upadhyay D. and Anu G. (2012). Morale, welfare measure, job satisfaction: The key mantras for gaining a competitive edge. International Jour. of Physical and Social Sciences, 2 (7), 80-94.
Usmani S., Kumari K. and Hussain J. (2013). Diversity, Employee Morale and Customer Satisfaction: The Three Musketeers. Journal of Economics, Business and Management, 3(1), 11-18.
Winer, R. S. (2001). A Framework for Customer Relationship Management. California Management Review, 43(4), 89-104.
