Assessing poor quality service: perception of customer service representatives Essay

The article written by Marilyn M. Helms and Donna T. Mayo from Dalton State College, Dalton, Georgia. USA purpose is to explain on how customer service relates with customer dissatisfaction which resulted in customer defection. In service industries, service plays important roles as it relates closely with profit and firm longevity. Researcher also claims that good retention ability from service managers can leverage their organizational performance. This is been done by complain management programs. Also the author claims that poor customer service from customer service representative will also be one of the factors of customer defection. This is been proven that dissatisfaction is derived from experience with a service representative during the dispensing of a service. A survey has been conducted to 100 people for a retailer shop. The retailer can stand to lose 32 to 36 current or potential customers. Dissatisfied customer are ought to spread rumor of their bad experience and has an even greater impact on shoppers that not involved in the problem. Customers are more likely to post their bad feeling on web sites and blogs and 15 percents of dissatisfied customer post their comment. It is critical to determined service crisis and work to correct them before customers defect. Surveys have been done to call center service representative as they experience a different problem from customers every day. This employees is been evaluated based on their service delivery process. This is also to identify areas to improve the service quality given by call center employees. Research has conducted a survey to collect data from the employees perceptions. They had been thrown out a two question surveys. First question is to list out three example of poor customer service by putting employees in customer point of view. Second question is to choose one of the three reasons that can cause them to choose other service provider. The results is been analyze by an experience quality management and current customer satisfaction literature. The result of the data that had been collected shows at least 10 critical reason of customer defection. There are rude employees or poor attitude, slow services, employees not paying attention on attending customers issue, overall poor accommodation, lack of training or lack of product knowledge, service failure, poor quality, lack of patience, product availability, appearance or cleanliness and prices issue. Of all of the reason, most of the largest turnover for customer is rude behavior and attitude of the employees. This is followed by employee not paying attention and poor services to customer. Researches had found out between all the reason, they had categorize which reason that most likely to end the business relationship. They had found out that the above reason were most often within the employees and also one of the top reasons why customer defects. By addressing the above matter correctly can reduce defection from customer before the problem is starting as this can improve customer retention. There were also avoidable service failures such as slow services and errors on delivery. Researchers also conduct surveys on hospitality industries. Most answers from the surveys include slow response, service failure, lack of knowledge and also poor services. Researches have found out several factors that influence customer satisfaction and retention. It has been categorize as technical and interpersonal. As matters relates to technical is such as slow services, employees not paying attention or not attending on customer request, being rushed or associated of being pushy, mistakes and overall poor services. As matters related to interpersonal is more on the employees attitude. Few factors such as rude employees and poor attitude, lack of training, appearances and cleanliness, product availability, poor quality and prices. By identifying this categories can assist to improve service delivery process and revamp the employees training process. The author claims that there is an avoidable and unavoidable group of service failures. Product availability, poor quality and prices is been categorize as a poor service and its seems to influence customer perception of the overall quality. Product availability is an inventory and ordering or scheduling issue that management could easily address. Although prices and poor quality is beyond the control of the management, they should reported back to their vendor. Benchmarking of service delivery among competitors can greatly improve the processes. Author concludes that managers are able to validate most of the problems in avoidable breakdowns categories. Ranking of defection can actually aid managers to directing those service failures that requires most attention. One of the efforts that can be used is by rewarding employees that gives a good service to the customer. Role playing of angry customer and also other variety of service delivery situation should be used for employee screening. Benchmarking comparison of customer service versus rude customer service responses also conclude important training materials. Companies should ensure their delivery sounds genuine and does not appear memorized or rehearsed. Customer may not perceive a long wait or finding the representative mistakes, price or lack of product availability as severe as they might have as long as they been treated in a professional and a courteous manner. Management should take action on employees who’s been rude or having attitude problem towards customer. If customer claims slow service as an indicator of poor service quality, the management can set a time frame of each calls and created a standard service based on time. They can develop procedures to determine an acceptable period of time to perform a particular task. This also can improve standard operating time for each call. Within this, they also can adjust the process of call handling by the agent and set a standardization of service. Companies also can gain benefit from customer feedback on the services. This is when the organization can take action on case to case basis to keep them improvised. As for opinion, this research is important because nowadays, customer service is everywhere. To enhance customer satisfaction, the service providers should identify what make customer satisfaction with their products and services. In order to know either the customers are happy and satisfied with the products and services, feedback from them is important. It is because, the feedback can give company or organization achieved higher profit or reputation. For example, a cosmetic product where the provider ask feedback from the customer by using e-mail, short messaging service (SMS) and calling customer by asking their satisfaction after using the product after one week. This is to know either the customer are satisfied or not with the products and services. Besides, it will give good word-of-mouth when they spread good things about the products and services they used. Thus, some recommendation needs to add in this research which is, the researcher need to expand the respondents to more vary. Besides, these studies also need to focus on sole service industries or companionship segments. Therefore, the agent or the front lines should be train enough to serve customer and make customer satisfied with the products and services provide by the company or organization. In some industries, customer is their asset to gain maximum profit and reputation. So by identifying what make customer unsatisfied with the products and services, they can actually improve their skills, communication, system and also their products and services it to make customer satisfied. Besides, internal customer also needs to focus. It is because, when internal customer satisfied or happy, they can serve external customer with full manner and motivated.