Managing People for Service Advantage + TB Chapters 11 Flashcards
(31 cards)
Importance of service personnel
A core part of the product
Affect sales
Represent the service firm and the brand
Key driver of customer loyalty
Determine productivity
Boundary spanners
Link inside of organization to outside world and often experience role stress from multiple roles they have to perform
3 main causes of role stress
Organization vs client: dilemma whether to follow company policies or satisfy customer demands
Person vs role: conflicts between what jobs require and employee’s own personality and beliefs
eg: green/blue haired starbucks employees with a stick up their ass
Client vs client: conflicts between customers
Emotional labour
The act of expressing socially desired emotions during service transactions
Service sweatshops
Deployment of new technology methods can change the nature of the work environment
Employee cycle of failure
Narrow job design for low skill levels
Emphasis on rules rather than service
Use of technology to control quality
Bored employees who lack ability to respond to customer problems
Dissatisfied with poor service attitude
Low service quality
High employee turnover
Customer cycle of failure
Repeated emphasis on attracting new customers
Customers dissatisfied with employee performance
Customers always served by new faces
Fast customer turnover
Ongoing search for new customers to maintain sales volume
Costs of short-sighted policies are ignored
Constant expense of recruiting, hiring, training
Lower productivity of inexperienced new workers
Higher costs of winning new customers to replace those lost
Loss of revenue stream from dissatisfied customers
Loss of potential customers from negative WOM
Employee cycle of mediocrity
Most commonly found in large, bureaucratic organizations
Service delivery is oriented towards:
Standardized service
Operational efficiencies
Promotions based on long service
Successful performance measured by absence of mistakes
Rule-based training
Little freedom in narrow and repetitive jobs
Customer cycle of mediocrity
Customers find organizations frustrating to deal with
Little incentive for customer to cooperate for VCC
Complaints are often made to already unhappy employees
Customers often stay because of lack of choice
Cycle of success
Longer-term view of financial performance; firm seeks to prosper by investing in people
Attractive pay and benefits attract better job applicants
More focused recruitment, intensive training, and higher wages make it more likely that employees are happier = higher productivity
Broadened job descriptions with empowerment practices enable front-line staff to control quality, facilitate service recovery
Service talent cycle for service firms (3 steps)
Hire the right people
Enable your people
Motivate and energize your people
Use learning through experience
People learn if they are motivated
Effort of self-discovery must be well guided by role models and led by managers
Enlist frontline leaders and mentors
Role modelling must authentically exhibit the sort of emotions that they should be passing on to others
Raising skill and will of leaders involves the same degree of self-discovery that frontline employees should experience
Create an environment where employees can learn from “positive deviants”
Empowerment is most appropriate when
Firm’s business strategy is based on personalized service and competitive differentiation
Emphasis on extended relationships vs short term
Use of complex and non-routine tech
Service failures are non-routine and cannot be designed out of the system
Business environment is unpredictable, consisting of surprises
Requirements for empowering the frontline (IKPR)
Information (about organizational, team, and individual performance)
Knowledge (that enables employees to understand and contribute to organizational, team, and individual performance)
Power (to make decisions that influence work procedures and organizational direction at the higher level and transaction-specific decisions at the micro level)
Rewards (based on organizational, team, and individual performance)
Tools to identify the best employee candidates
Employ multiple structured interviews, conducted by different interviewers
Conduct personality tests (courtesy, perceptiveness, ability to communicate)
Give applicants a realistic preview of the job
Internal comms to shape service culture and behaviour
Professionalizing the front line
Training service employees actively includes teaching them about
Organizational culture, purpose, and strategy
Interpersonal and technical skills
Product/service knowledge
Reinforce training to shape behaviours
Internal marketing and communications
Necessary in large service businesses that operate in widely dispersed sites
Employees are kept informed of new policies, changes in service features, initiatives
Nurtures team spirit and support
Achieves harmonious working relationships that builds employee trust, respect, and loyalty
3 levels of employee involvement
Suggestion involvement
Job involvement
High involvement
Suggestion involvement
Employees make recommendations through formalized programs
Job involvement
Jobs redesigned
Employees retrained, supervisors reoriented to facilitate performance
High involvement
Information is shared
Employees skilled in teamwork, problem solving, etc
Participate in management decisions
Profit sharing and stock ownership
Elements to build high-performance service delivery teams
Often requires cross-functional coordination
Teams, training, and empowerment go hand-in-hand
Creating successful service delivery teams
