Bad Experience Short Story: Customer Service Management

Bad Experience in Customer Service Management

I'm currently employed at a call center that deals with manufacturing assurance of a quickly evolving furniture company. The furniture company is named Bobs Discount Furniture, and this is the organization I will elaborate on. Our mission is to bring consumers all around the United States quality furniture at the lowest possible price. We also like to provide our customers with unbeatable quality, style, comfort, and service and make it affordable every single day without resorting to gimmicks.

Within the three years I have been employed with them, I've witnessed the organization grow immensely. As of July 2019, the company had a total of 121 stores in 18 different states, primarily in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, and West Coast. Not to mention they're looking into opening some stores in my hometown, Arizona. The number of employees within the Bobs industry is roughly 2500.

Program Management

When dealing with an association of the size of Bobs Discount Furniture, there is going to be customers that are highly content with their encounter and also customers that had a terrible encounter. In regards to the consumers that had a bad experience, they expose companies within their social network, which can easily escalate into a crisis for any business. Bobs Discount has generated a specified department to handle dissatisfied customer & their department name is Bobs Social Media Team (BSMT). BSMT is there & ready to assist customers that have endured a not-so-satisfying experience. This is considered a preparedness policy to prevent probable crises. BSMT group of experts responsible for reviewing the company's social media entails 150 personnel; they're managed by the program coordinator named Candance McBride. When BSMT witnesses a dissatisfied customer or a customer with bad reviews, they will reach out to them and provide them with a solution. Some of the solution given by BSMT is parts or servicing of the item reported damaged, exchanges, reselections, or refunds of merchandise. The goal is to, one, prevent a crisis and ruin their reputation, and, two, not to lose a customer.

Planning

A simple one-star review can have a significant impact on an organization. As social media transpires more & more, there are hundreds of thousands of people that can see such a review. Not to mention when a customer publishes their bad experience with their friends and family, that makes potential future consumers take their business elsewhere. If the customer post goes rival, that makes it that much more of a negative impact on the company. According to a Harvard Business School study, a 1-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a 5-9 percent increase in revenue. The difference in revenue between 3 starts and five starts can be as high as 18 percent, meaning a restaurant with 1 million in annual revenue may be losing as much as 180,000 every year because of a negative reputation (Sickler. 2018). In order to prevent a customer from having a bad experience, starts off with the training given to your staff.

The workers must be knowledgeable of the product being sold and set the correct expectations with the customer. As a consumer myself, I would prefer transparency over a lie any day. Sadly, in the business world, there will always be a percentile that is dissatisfied, and an organization must mitigate the risk. If a complaint is witnessed, the quicker BSMT can respond, the better. One must place themselves in their shoes & empathize & demonstrate to the client you're prepared to assist. By providing the client assistance during times of trouble, the possibility of losing the customer decreases.

Implementation

Resources Management entails numerous things, one of them being human skills. When dealing with negative criticism, the skills demonstrated by the agents within BSMT must be solution driven. The agent must take ownership of the situation because, in the end, we're representing the company as a whole and not pointing fingers at a specified individual. So, meetings need to be conducted frequently between the employees at BSMT & the store sales associates. Employees must be on the same page regarding protocol & transparency with the customers and know what is expected of them as well as the negative repercussion if the standards are not achieved. When the expectations are clarified among employees, there must be a trustworthy & responsible employee that will be assigned to mentor & support the employees that are in need of assistance to minimize misinterpretations among employees and customers. Mentors can be an incident managers, and they can identify, analyze & correct hazards to prevent a future reoccurrence. If employees have been witnessed setting incorrect expectations with the customer, the mentors will coach the employee to minimize it from happening again; consistent training is key.

Testing and Exercises

Once the employee has been coached, this is when the testing and effectiveness of the coaching are exercised. The mentors must be vigilant and see if anything out of protocol is being implemented by the trainee. If the coaching is successful, the mentors can watch out for any other outliers for coaching and development. If, for some reason, the person that was coached was just not willing to implement the areas of improvement, it's more of a will issue, not a skill issue. This is when the program improvement phase takes effect. The employee is not cooperating, and that's when disciplinary action is executed. Whether the employee gets a verbal warning or a final write-up will be determined by the severity of the situation.

References

1. Bobs Discount Furniture. (n.d). About Bobs. Retrieved from https://www.mybobs.com/about
2. Corbett, M. (n.d). How to Assess Problem Employees: Will vs. Skill. Retrieved from https://www.leadersbeacon.com/how-to-assess-problem-employees-will-vs-skill/
3. Sickler, J. (2018). The True Cost of Bad Reviews (& How to Fix Them). Retrieved from https://www.business2community.com/crisis-management/the-true-cost-of-bad-reviews-and-how-to-fix-them-02133039

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