CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT AND SERVICE QUALITY IN EVENTS AND SPORTS

Transcription

1 CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT AND SERVICE QUALITY IN EVENTS AND SPORTS INDIVIDUAL WRITTEN ASSIGNMENT Gale Teo Mei Eng 12/11/2009 Based on the attached case study on China s Customer Service Revolution, what can companies in China do to achieve service excellence?

2 From the article China s Customer Service Revolution, we can see that world globalization caused companies in China to realize the importance of a paradigm shift from a product-centric to customer-centric environment. Competition gets heated up between the foreign MNCs and local companies as well as within the home-grown companies due to modernization of consumer s attitude. As a new entry into WTO, China not only struggle to detain customers from post WTO, they have realized that there is a huge piece of untapped domestic market where local companies can target on. Being a technological advance country, companies in China can in addition, tap on home-ground advantages of cheap cost such as labour and material costs, strategic location (accessibility to neighboring countries markets) to further enhance on the product services. However, competitiveness intensified as new markets and product categories created increased demand for services in many existing markets. At such, Chinese customers are slowly getting used to being courted. Improving on the service quality and attaining service excellence seems to be the only platform for product differentiation in our current context. It is the customer service that differentiates the outstanding company from ordinary companies. The following service excellence framework provides an over view on how companies in China is able to deliver results by looking at the different dimensions in the framework, namely Leadership, Planning, Information, People, Processes, Customers and Results. (Source: Spring Singapore, ) Page 2

3 Leadership. In order to have strong foundations of service excellence, management of companies in china must understand the importance of creating foundation by understanding consumer needs and behavior. All visions and business strategies are worthless unless both management and staff feel passionate about them. As agreed in the article by Mr Lui Yun Chuan from China Netcom s, CRM is an all round strategy which involves the management of company along with support staff. Having supporting staffs is the one of the key player in determining the success in achieving service quality for the company. Companies in China should abandon the traditional mindset of service staffs as low-skilled staff that are submissive and thus exercise dominance over them. Some attributes that good leaders should posses such as showing genuine interest, concern and welfare in each employee, lavish them with praise and encouragement and practice fairness. Leaders in companies should also understand that spending time and money in proper selection and recruitment for outstanding service personnel is necessary. They should be able to identify the importance of employee training and developing new skills sets, new knowledge and new positive attitudes due to the progressive competition among the various business markets. A form of motivation comes from enabling staff, particularly frontline staff (empowerment) which helps to drive values in them that they belong to the company. They will then do their best for their leaders in achieving the companies goals. Planning. A strategic plan should include companies principles values and beliefs as well as vision of moving forward to position them better in the industry. Such plan should always be supplemented by a feedback loop where management can constantly revert back whenever companies are making any decision that will cause their vision to go off track. Information Gathering. Reviewing of the current situation regarding customer service in the company helps the organization to address the problem areas and issues, weak verses strong point, as well as their service deficiency. They can obtain this information by conducting interviews with customers and employees and through historical records such as complaints or compliment letters. Due to globalization and changes in customer s expectations, there is a need to develop breakthrough thinking in designing innovative or improvement in service. Haier as China s number one customer service enterprise is a more innovative company as a result of paying attention to the consumer. As mentioned by Jiang, Head of Customer Service at Haier Group, It is not possible to make things by imagination alone. You need to learn from the marketplace, from partners, rivals and most importantly customers. The distinction of such can Page 3

4 help companies to attract sufficient volume of business among the others. Companies can also relook at their service blue prints to close up any gaps in services as well as ensuring commercial viability. People, Processes & Consumer (Customer Interface) People. Many services involve direct interaction between consumer and service staff. These interactions greatly influence consumers perception of service quality. It is relatively easy to compete on product and price but the most difficult thing is to compete on service ( Heartware ). Thus, service became the core part of a product in which service staffs are often the most important people in the company who is able to generate sales and develop customer loyalty for the company. Valerie Zeithaml, Leonard Berry and A. Parasuraman have identified 5 board areas to evaluate service quality, namely Tangibles, Reliability, Responsiveness, Assurance and Empathy. Tangibles. Companies must ensure that staffs are well groomed and not dressed shabbily. Appropriate eye contact and warm smile should be maintained in spite the shy characteristic of Asians. We get into habits and routines and follow them without thinking. Every single contact with a customer is a touch point in which the customer can be touched by our behavior. The more positive the frontline staff presents themselves to customer helps to portrait employees as confident and also taking pride of what they are doing. Reliability. Often Asians based on trust to carry out the continuity of partnership between one another. Staff should not over-commit if they are not comfortable with any request by customers. Responsiveness. Passive response by staff reflects their willingness to help and the ability to provide prompt service to customers. Assurance. Service staffs must come forth as true form of honesty and believability. They are to possess the skills and knowledge required to perform the relevant service, with basic politeness and respect. Empathy. Staff should show empathy by listening and understanding customer s needs. Remembering customer s name is also a form of showing your interest in your Page 4

5 customers. The key to delivering outstanding service the Asian style, is to put energy into building and sustaining relationships with customers. To excel in customer service, employees must go beyond the routine and inject some positive emotional energy into each relationship no matter how brief it is. Process. The impersonal aspect of relating to equipment, efficiency and reliability is considered as a kind of hardware services. It begins with the design of effective delivery processes, specifying how the operating and delivery systems link together to created the value proposition. The designs of such processes are sometimes dependent on the servicescape. Processes can be capture and review on a service blue print where it can highlight possible fail points as well as pinpoint stages in the process. Leading edge software will give a leading competitive edge. Direct mailers and database marketing are use to communicate the benefits of products to all their customers. However, companies need to recognize both advantages and disadvantages when incorporating such software into their service process. It is important for companies to make sure that design is user friendly for customers and widely accepted by customers. Consumer. Customer s willingness to continue the relationship with a company in long term depends on several factors. Building higher level of bonding such as getting to know the names of regular customers, providing customized services to loyal customers or even align their way of doing things with the customer s own processes needs. From given article, we can see that companies are providing one stop services portals for customers, delivering personalized products and services. In the case of Nin Sheng Bank, PCCW went beyond their core scope of providing technology and process consultancy for Nin Sheng Bank but a business solution in totality. Post sales customer care and tapping relevant information about a customer can better improve the relationship with their customers. A simple audit, ranking, customer comments cards, questionnaires, face to face surveys, and mystery shopping or interviews can often lead to innovation ideas from customers. Proper complain handling and service recovery is necessary when services failed customers. The correct way of service recovery is an opportunity to retain a valued customer. In conclusion, companies in china should make use of the service excellence framework as a guide to further enhance their current service level. Consistency in maintaining service level should be a continuous effort by such companies. With all the different dimensions mentioned in place, customer satisfaction and loyalty will thus result in revenue growth and profit generation. Page 5

6 (Freemantle,D., The Eight Suns of Asian Service, Prentice Hall 2003) (Lovelock, C., Wirtz, J.,Chew,P. Essential of Service Marketing, Pearson 2009, P 27 & 369) Page 6