Streamlining processes for happier customers
Special Education Platform (SEP) has over 320 employees in New Zealand and Australia. The organisation provides education resource solutions to English Speaking Colleges.
During the companies last strategic planning day SEP management and staff have identified some issues with the Customer support department in particular complaints section and sales section.
Ideas that have been generated during the strategic planning included comments such as:
Organising a special complaints team to deal with issues, which will hopefully speed up work of current customer service staff.
Improve the SEP’s customer service reputation.
It has been a constant struggle to explain to management that the service in handling customers is not up to standard with other providers and competitors.
Sales have been suffering because sales staff are constantly dealing with feedback and complaints
It has been very visible from all the feedback that the service department does not handle complaints all that well which means that lots of the complaints handled are escalated to the Team Leaders who spend time recapping each issue with the customers to find solutions about how to assist the clients.
In the past years the organisation has never really spent time to educate staff about how to handle complaints but since their new marketing manager started, three months ago, the complaints issues have been discussed in nearly every staff meeting and the need for having specialists in providing customer support and handling of complaints has become quite necessary.
The marketing manager has decided to spend the next four weeks or so identifying issues by collating, evaluating, investigating and assessing the process of handling customers and seek solutions to develop a continuous customer service plan and make positive change.
You have been asked by the marketing manager to find out issues, develop a continuous improvement plan to improve customer service strategies, develop and compile a report to provide ideas to the marketing manager on how to improve, monitor and review customer service.
The manager expects you to include the following points in your investigation and the plan.
Investigate and identify, assess customer needs (by reviewing statistics and interview staff)
Investigate employee’s views on how can we improve customer satisfaction
Evaluated how does the organisation review customer feedback and is it effective and appropriate for the organisation and why / why not?
What kind of strategies can be implemented to monitor, review and develop customer service standards
How should the organisation ensure that regular checks of the new department is monitored and improved as needed (especially in 1 / 3 / 6 and 12 months) and how future improvements can be implemented and evaluated
Design and training / coaching plan for all team members and ensure that the information explains who training can be implemented so staff are well trained to ensure customer satisfaction
How records will be maintained
Involvement of staff to create ideas and assist with implementation and future development of processes and structures of the department
If and how training and the new processes will be communicated and trained in the best and sustainable ways
How issues or success will be recorded, reported to staff, management, other stakeholders and clients.
And provide some advise on how to improve resources to minimise complaints about them in the future.
The marketing manager has advised all staff that you will be working on this project and that you may be contacting them for assistance.