Yakka Tech’s Customer Service Growth Brings Negative Consequences

This case tells us about the Information technology service firm (Yakka Tech Pty. Ltd. ) This firm provides I. T services throughout Australia and New Zealand. Basically, this firm install and upgrades enterprise software systems and related hardware on the client’s sites. To provide all these services it employees 1500 people. It has customer service division that consist of four customer contact centres serving clients within each region. Each customer service centre consists of half- dozen departments representing functional specialisations and a single department consist of more than two dozen employees.

Over last five years time period Yakka tech’s customer service business has nearly doubled. But this growth not only brought positive aspects to the company, rather brought various negative consequences such as, increased customer complaints regarding poor customer services, in-enthusiastic response from the employees, conflict between employees of various departments, increased number of employee’s resignation. This not only increased the labour costs but it also showed direct impact in terms of productivity of the employees. Due to these negative consequences Yakka tech decided to increase the pay rate and keep the employees.

Moreover, they also offered a share of profit with employees if they work more than two years for the company. This reduced the resignation of the employees, whatsoever, customers complaints did not end. Q1) What Symptom (s) in this case suggests that something has gone wrong? It is a fact that something went wrong, due to which this I. T service provider was unable to live up through customer’s expectation. As the business grows, it is likely that the work pressure will be more. Proper management is required to make work pressure less.

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Moreover, a proper channel of communication from the time of query has been made by the customer and ticket has been issued till the time it has been solved should flow. And rather than closing the ticket and re-issuing another ticket to same customer with same problem it would be effective to make a record of customer with same ticket number that could be used as future reference if some complaints or queries would be used by same customer again. Re-issuing of ticket again and again to same customer and different way of handeling same problem by same company would definitely make customer unsatisfied and ould cause more time. This is one of the symptoms that shows the initial mistake of Yakka tech. Similarly, Being I. T service provider, it should have had individual account of customer with their unique reference code that describes the type of system they are operation in their organisation. So that once customer give their refrence any employee with related department gets the case history of what had been done by previous colleague and what needs to be done further more. This would make it lot easier for the employees to understand the customer’s problem and solve query quicker.

This is the second symptom that created customer dissatisfaction and longer time to tackle with some problem that created blockage in several departments that over loaded the work. Moreover, when the query had to deal with more than one department of the division it always created customer complaints. This was one of the major symptoms of customer’s dis satisfaction and yakka tech’s internal employee conflict. Since, every single employee were unaware of how the customer was dealt by previous employee, every single time each employee had to deal with each customer form the beginning.

This would create frustration for the client. Due to work pressure and number of call waiting there was no proper communication between employees of different department. Yakka tech should had tried to figure out possible reasons for employee resignation. In many cases pay rate is not only the reason for employee’s resignation. On the other hand company’s first priority should be to deal with customer. Customers were not satisfied by the way they were served. Hence Yakka should have take a better step by talking with employees.

Supervisor and managers to try identify what kind of problem they are going through to serve the customer. Another symptom that shows something went wrong was, due to lack of communication between management and employees of different division. Where employees felt they had to do what they were employed for. Same time they had to listen to number for frustrated customers and job was becoming monotonus. At this stage there should have been some role from management to step in have a meeting with employees make them cheer up and assure them to make some flexible way of working.

Due to lack of such approach, despite the pay rate was increased the customer were still not satisfied and employees were working just for the sake of high payment. These were some of the symptoms that suggest something has gone wrong in Yakk tech Pty. Ltd. 2. What are the main causes of these symptoms? 2. 1 Customer complains regarding poor quality service. Unhappy customers are bad news for any company. Every single complaint from a client is a manifestation of dissatisfaction because of poor quality service.

Customer complains should be considered as a major factor as it will serve as a feed back of the company IT systems infrastructure(managing customer complains). Yakka Tech’s customer service business has doubled over the past five years yet the management was not focused towards the existing complains process and how it should be handled. Customer complains of Yakka Tech need to be defined and clarify the company’s policies to establish procedures in order to satisfy their clients. The clients’ requirements need to be synchronized with the company’s resources is one of the important element in complaint handling.

The complains should be addressed at the earliest and in a fair approach rather than having a defensive manner of dealing the problems. Developing a structured customer complaint management can prevent this problem. 2. 2 High employee turn over The number of employee resignation in YakkaTech contact centers has risen above industry average until eighteen months ago. It resulted in increase in labour cost due to recruiting and training of new technical staff and caused low productivity of new staves.

There should be good relationship between employee satisfaction, employee turnover and customer satisfaction(better employees). Employee turnover will be high in a company if the work environment is not up to the standard, which is exactly what happened in YakkaTech and that resulted in negative effects between the relationship of the company and its customers. The management needs to understand the reasons for high employee turn over and need to take necessary steps to overcome it. Lower productivity of employees can be reduced if the employee turnover is lesser as new employees are the main reason for lower productivity.

Some of the reasons for high employee turnover are poor management, low employee compensation and not considering employees quality of life. 2. 3 Poor customer service training. according to the result of an employee survey as well as informal comments since then many of the YakkaTech employees said that they find their job monotonous and have the filings for disconnection from the work they do. This has resulted in failure on customer service skills and behaviors which cause in increase in responsibilities performed by a customer service staff.

So the training that company gives to the new employees should emphasize to gain patience when dealing with customers problems and giving real effort to solve it. YakkaTech should design the training programme to achieve the predetermined objectives goals and needs of the organization. Improved communication skills, retention of customers, problem solving capabilities focus on customer satisfaction and maximum and effective use of the resource available. 2. 4 Conflicts. There have been few complaints about the ongoing conflicts with people in other departments and the stress of serving dissatisfied customers.

The reasons for conflicts in YakkaTech may be because departments have different objectives and if their members cant find common values and goals they cannot cooperate which fail to coordinate team action effectively. Changes take place constantly in an organization and these changes can generate emotions and employees can more easily adopt to change if they are well prepared, included and supported. Task interdependence may be another important conflict in the firm that is conflict between individuals or groups that are dependant on one another.

Lack of proper communication between different divisions can cause conflict. The management can develop different approaches that fit employees’ personalities and responsibilities. Some of the conflict management skills that YakkaTech can adopt are, getting feedback from employees about the different operations of the department, assessing the source of the conflict and different conflict management styles. 2. 5 Lack of team motivation. YakkaTech’s executive team decided to raise pay raise for its customer service staff to become among the highest in the industry.

They assumed that high rate would improve morale and reduce turn over and reducing hiring costs and improving productivity. Increased pay rates failed to improve morals but it did reduce employee turn over in the firm. It clearly shows that there is lack of motivation by the management to maintain effective team work and employee retention. Interesting work, appreciation, pay, good working conditions, and job security are important factors in helping to motivate. (http://www. bpir. com/employee-motivation/menu-id-71/implementation. html). Work and personal life of an employee should be given importance in the company.

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