Mountain West Health Plans, Inc

[Name of the Professor]

Management

01-09-2012

Mountain West Health Plans, Inc

1: Issues faced by Martin Quinn

The customer service department at Mountain West Health Plans, Inc is facing severe crises in the form of increase cost being borne as a result of the labor intensive nature of the department. When the former director of customer service Evelyn Gustafson's retired, Martin Quinn found it to be the perfect opportunity to replace her with someone who can increase the efficiency greatly and substantially reduce the cost of the firm.

Evelyn Gustafson herself came up the ranks from a customer service representative to becoming the director of the customer service department at Mountain West Health Plans. She could relate very well to the customer service representatives feelings after taking a stressful call. She was aware that the work required a lot of dedication, commitment and intense level of customer satisfaction. Bearing in mind, the high level of standards require to meet customer satisfaction, she gave her employees the luxury of flexible timings and also facilitated them with rigorous trainings to keep them aware of the skills required to deliver customer satisfaction and resolve people's issues.

Evelyn Gustafson urged her employees to always put themselves in the customer's shoes when someone calls them and should strive towards resolving customer complaints and queries before hanging up the call. The results achieve were good as the employee turnover rate drop down from 25-40% to just 10%. Customers in general were satisfied, except for some who complained about the time they had to spend on hold. The department's salaries accounted for the company's 70% of the budget, yet Evelyn Gustafson was unwilling to reduce cost and increase the department's efficiency in terms of responding to calls.

She was replaced with Erik Rasmussen, who was assigned the task of bringing the cost under control. He immediately increases the number of calls that representatives need to take in an hour. The company adopted statistical standards for measuring employee performance that was focus on enhancing speed and recording calls. Through the software use, work schedules were devised as per the needs. Employees were made to work hard with proper schedules and their trainings were slashed by their new boss.

With set performance schedules, response rate improved leading to less holding time for the customers. Cost was coming down, yet it came at a huge cost as turnover rate reached 30% and growing. Customer dissatisfaction complaints were coming with people saying that the lack of experience on the part of inexperienced customer service representatives led to improper imparting of product information.

Martin Quinn issue is pretty simple he needs to bring the cost down, increase efficiency and provide greater customer satisfaction. Evelyn Gustafson has done it all, she can relate well with customers and employees need, If Martin Quinn can negotiate well with her and convince her to come to terms of reducing departmental budget and enhancing efficiency, then great results could be achieved. The young business graduate although quick efficient, lacks the wisdom ...