For over five decades, Innovative Widget has gained a reputation in terms of their operations and become the largest manufacturer of widgets in Australia. It is a family-owned and run company. After the founder’s management, his sons and daughters have occupied the Board of Directors.

There had been little change at Innovative Widget during his management for fifteen years. Due to little competition, the company could take a dominant and safe position in the market. Approximately five years ago, however, it was noticed that the company’s sales began to suffer from recession, and that the previous management built up by the founder was vulnerable to unexpected challenge. Eventually, they request a firm to provide them with management consultant in order to cope with their difficulties.

By undertaking a pre-audit with staff interviews work processes and departmental records; they were able to generate an initial report that names some areas for concern. The following is the concerns:

· Unawareness of their external customer’s needs

· Unawareness of their internal customer’s needs

· Inadequacy in policies and procedures for customer management

The managing director admitted his inappropriate attitude toward the customers in the case of dealing with customer’s complaints and price negotiations.

2. Methods of customer service

As mentioned earlier, customer service is the way an organization interacts with a customer at all stages of the purchasing process, i.e. before, during and after the purchase.

The most obvious customer service is that given to a customer when buying a product (a tangible item) form a shop. Advice on product selection, the transaction itself and the after-sales service are often undertaken between the customer and provider face-to-face. The way a customer perceives this service will guide the customer to conclude a sale, do repeat business or recommend the shop to other people.

Pre-sales advice and after sales service are often undertaken by telephone; in this case, consideration needs to be given to how to make that a quality service.

Often the sale of some goods and service are conducted by telephone with written confirmation in the form of letters or emails. Such examples include buying insurance or transferring a utilities provider. The challenge here is to make the telephone contact and written material exceed the customer’s expectations.

Recently, more transactions have been undertaken entirely by Internet, such as telephone credit for a mobile telephone. The design of the web pages and processes are important factors in ensuring a quality service.

3. Customer service vision and mission

Vision:

The world’s leading Consumer Company for automotive products and services.

Mission:

•Transform customers into advocates

•Create the best place to work within the communities we serve

•Deliver exceptional worldwide customer contact and business processing outsourcing solutions

We are a global family with a proud heritage passionately committed to providing personal mobility for people around the world. We anticipate consumer needs and deliver outstanding products and services that improve people’s lives

4. Product standards

a) Reliability

· The sizes you want are 5mm, 6mm, 7mm, 8mm, 9mm, and 10mm.

· They must be made to a tolerance of no more than +/- 5%.

b) Assurance - You want delivery within 24 hours of ordering.

c) Tangibles - You need cylindrical stainless steel widgets.

d) Empathy

· You expect your suppliers to dress smartly in clean uniforms and deliver in clean vans

· You will not tolerate impolite or unprofessional suppliers.

e) Responsiveness - You expect widgets to be guaranteed for two years from the date of purchase.

5. Policies and procedures

Identification of customer needs

You need cylindrical stainless steel widgets.

The sizes you want are 5mm, 6mm, 7mm, 8mm, 9mm, and 10mm.

They must be made to a tolerance of no more than +/- 5%.

You don’t want to pay more than $25 for each widget.

You expect widgets to be guaranteed for two years from the date of purchase.

Customer complaints

You are a customer (use your real name) who telephones innovative Widgets with a complaint.

You are a self-employed gardener and have just returned home after buying a 5mm widget from innovative Widgets. The round journey took you over an hour to complete. When you opened the packet you found it contained a 7-mm widget. The packet has 5mm written on it but the widget inside is 7-mm. your receipt states 5-mm too. You only buy two or three widgets each year and this has really annoyed you. This is the second time this has happened to you. The last time this happened you got an apology and replacement and were told it wouldn’t happen again. You still had to repeat the journey to get a replacement though. You need the widget to fix your lawn mower and you can’t work without it.

Please try to be as realistic as possible during this exercise. This exercise will be monitored by the facilitator and forms part of the assessment for this module.

Collection of customer feedback from questionnaire

In the case of collecting customer’s feedbacks, the followings are a must:

a) Validity: When writing questions for a survey, they should be validated by conducting a smaller survey and interviewing the responder to ensure that they understood the question as it was intended to be understood.

b) Reliability: A question is considered reliable if the response given would be the same as a second response to the same question with the same condition. Reliability issues can be resolved by careful design of question and scale.

c) Avoidance: The questions must features impartiality, simplicity, two-in-one, acronyms, and impersonality.

Customer feedback survey

You are attending innovative Widgets, Customer Services Department meeting to discuss how to obtain customer feedback about your product and services.

Innovative Widgets produce and sell stainless steel widgets in the following sizes: 5mm, 6mm, 7mm, 8mm, 9mm and 10mm. they are guaranteed to be made within a tolerance of +/- 2%.

Your largest customer buys 40% of your widgets. There are two customers who buy around 10% each and the rest of your customers are ad-hoc buyers. Last year’s sales data shows that just over 1000 different customers bought widgets, some bought just one item.

Innovative Widgets only sell to trade customers so you know the name and contact details of all your customers.

Procedures

a) Greet the customer courteously and give them your name.

b) Listen fully to what the customer is saying. Try to gather all the facts about the complaint and jot them down. Ask questions and summaries what they are saying.

c) Never argue with the customer.

d) Apologize for any product fault of poor service. Be sympathetic. Ask if the customer will allow us to send the faulty item to our quality department for testing.

e) When you have all the details about the complaint, ask the customer how they world like it to be resolved.

f) No quibble product replacements or refunds are within all staff members’ authority.

g) All staff members can use their professional judgment and refund an additional 10% of the value of the faulty product up to a maximum value of $25.

h) Complaints involving damage to other property are covered by our insurance. Help the customer to complete the Claims Form and ask if the customer can obtain quotes for repairs.

i) All complaints involving injury must be referred to the Customer Service Manager. Agree a suitable time for the Customer Service Manager to call the customer.

j) Any complaint that is not covered in the above procedures must be directed to the Customer Service Manager. Agree a time for the Customer Service Manager to call the customer.

Policy and procedures for obtaining customer feedback

Similarly, a policy and procedure for obtaining customer feedback would contain who is accountable for obtaining customer feedback and who was responsible for undertaking the procedure’s tasks. The procedure’s tasks would include what strategies are to be used to obtain feedback.

6. Customer relationship management

Customer relationship management (CRM) refers to those organizational activities designed to establish and cement strong link with customers. The ultimate goal is to become a unique provider so that the customer is so delighted with what you provide so that the customer is so delighted with what you provide he or she has no need or intention to go anywhere else for your product.

Lager organizations utilize computerized customer relationship management systems that comprise an integrated database of information about all customers, activity schedulers and reports.

Typically, the database can provide instant access to all the information held about the customer to be able to converse with a full history of the customer at their fingertips.

CRM system can also schedule calls, meetings, invitations or mail-out as appropriate for the particular customer.

CRM can also act as an intelligence gathering opportunity with information about the customer being used by other internal departments such as the Sales Department, who would be interested in any upgrading or replacement opportunities.

Monitor customer service

· Ensure 90% of all calls are answered within 3 rings.

· Reduce operating expenditure by 2.5% of last year’s budget.

· Identify an internal replacement for complaints supervisor who retires in March

· Reduce staff absenteeism by 5% on last year’s figures.

· Produce a report on the opportunities for outsourcing the telephone complaints line October.

Customer service KPIs

· Time taken to answer customer calls

· Percentage of complaints resolved on the same day of complaint

· Achieving an agreed customer satisfaction score in feedback

· Undertaking an agreed number of customer feedback activities

Just Jin

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BSBCUS501C Manage quality customer service Assessment Task 1

1. Introduction