HR STRATEGIC POLICIES

HR Policies, Strategies & Objectives at Tengo Ltd.

HR Policies, Strategies & Objectives at Tengo Ltd.

Introduction

Tengo Ltd. is a notebook computers manufacturer. Its products sell in more than 30 countries, but the main Manufacturing, Support and Research and Development functions of their operations are based in UK. The firm primarily trades over the internet and so does not have any retail outlets. This makes their customer contact centre the most important part of the whole Organization's structure since it acts as the core; providing working on several key functions such as Technical Support and Complaints Management etc. The company offers its employees comparatively high pay than its competitors. However, recently the customer service quality has declined and has gotten very poor which is visible through the customer feedbacks and dissatisfaction. Apart from that, the company's employee turnover rate has greatly increased. This all seems to be somehow related to the recent benchmarking policy and criteria adopted by the HR Director of the firm.

Case Analysis

Answer 1

Causes of Poor Customer Quality

According to Bowen (2007), literature supports the view that Customer Satisfaction and Service Quality are two different but interrelated factors (p. 144). Negative feedbacks or Customer complaints confirm the dissatisfaction of a customer with product quality (Forbes, 2008, p. 190). In the case of Tengo Ltd., poor customer support service quality can be attributed to both internal problems of employees and the restructuring of the Organizational policies and procedures. The main causes of poor Customer Service Quality could be:

Automated Support System

According to Nousiainen (2012), automated customer support is a service providing customers with a self support system to find solutions to different problems (p. 8). When the management of Tengo Ltd. invested in building up an interactive online support system for their customers, the objective was to standardize customer support, improve the support response time and improve the ability of management to monitor the quality of the service. However, this latest strategy of management did not seem to display the expected response proving that Workplace Technology does not appear to improve the Customer Service Quality in this case.

This decline in service quality is because the employees of different departments have different requirements regarding the standardization that accompanies this latest automated system. Complaints department in particular would prefer more standardization due to the nature of its work. However, the technical department would favour a system with less standardization and more discretion and flexibility due to their job role requirements i.e. dealing with non standardized unique queries.

Strict Departmental Specialization removing Job Rotation

Job rotation leads to reduction in boredom, absenteeism, work stress & turnover and increases loyalty, innovation and production (Malinski, 2002, p. 675). The reduction in Customer Service quality is related to the impact of restructuring and work organization at Tengo Ltd. The rigid delineation between different departments and strategies of employee concentration in specific work areas and task specialization seem to have removed the job rotation; which was directly related to job satisfaction and service ...