Introduction
Customer satisfaction is the key to success for a business. It can lead a company to success or complete failure (Simon, 2006, p. 4). If a company manages to achieve high level of customer satisfactions it will be one step closer to form a new relationship with them. Satisfied customers can easily be turned into loyal customers. A loyal customer is one that ‘sticks’ with your company’s product and services as he, or she, believes that you deliver more than just a product, you deliver values and care (Jones, 2004, p. 43).
This is why for a successful business it is so important to keep a close relationship with customers and try to satisfy them as much as you can. Seeing that the company we are discussing about has received several complains by three of its major customer stores than something is not going the right direction. In order to assess correctly why this has happened, the investigator should control certain specific variables and look if they have changed. By doing this he can deduce the reasons of dissatisfaction messages received from the customer stores and avoid them in future transactions. Some of the basic variables to achieve customer satisfaction include the quality of the product being delivered, the final costs of it and the timing of delivery to the customers.
The Investigator role
In order to assess adequately what is going on with the company and, more importantly, how to correct anything that might be going wrong, the President of the company requested the role of an investigator. This is the role I will be doing. His role is to act as an independent, outside source of control.
This is done in order to ensure a sort of ‘objective’ view on the current company’s situation. This ‘objective’ view will help determine correctly the problems occurring in the company and design efficient strategies to resolve them.
Why the customer complains occurred
In the case we are discussing the president of the company has commissioned an investigator to prepare him a report about the report of some major clients complaining about quality of service of the company. Thus it is obvious that he investigator will search the data related to the product being delivered.
This quality control could be achieved by reviewing the data from the testing of quality of products made by the Research & Development Department of the company. Here we are talking about the ‘physical’ attributes of quality of the product being delivered, of course. Another source would be the feedback from customers themselves. These feedback data could be monitored to see what the customers have complained for relating to the product. This could be very helpful because the customers themselves would have expressed what is that the company is doing wrong. The same control as for the ‘physical’ quality of the products could be done to determine whether their final costs of delivery have changed. And a last major component in achieving customer satisfaction is timing in the delivery process. If you manage to deliver your products in time to the customer and if that timing is as short as possible, then you have gained a positive advantage. In our case, this positive advantage has been threatened because the time of delivery of products at the customer stores have been prolonged by at least three hours.
The changes in order approval
Now that the reason why customers have complained is determined the investigator should be careful to find out the causes of that led to the increase in time operations. By monitoring the data of the company it comes out that lately a change was made requiring the credit manager to approve all restock order. This change was made from the necessities of preventing a sales cost increase in the company’s balance sheet. Without the credit manager approval the company could restock products that in fact do not fulfill the requirements of being restocked.
This is why the company decided to analyze each case in order to accept only those who fulfill the conditions of being restocked. It came out of the necessity to stop the large loses in accounts receivable that were seen during the last period of four months. The fact that more and more orders have been turned back for restock means that something was not as it should with their production. It may be their quality or simply the fact that customers wanted it to have certain additional features in it. In any case, it means that the company have failed to properly respond to customer needs and desires in the market.
But the response of the company could make things even worse. As a matter of fact, what it has done is to add a chain of control to the products. And this situation not only will increase the timing of delivery to the customer stores, because the credit manager needs time to verify each case adequately, but will also have a negative impact on the internal network of the company. The labor force, the staff of the company, would slow down their timing of work which will negatively impact their work performance. If this happens, than the company will begin having not only problems with time schedules of delivery to customers but even internal labor-culture problems. These ‘labor-culture’ problems are what impact negatively the outside image of a company (Gomez-Mejia et al., 2008. P. 36). Thus, by adding a chain of control and thus increase timing of delivery of the products, the company has not addressed as it should this problem but, on the contrary, it may lead to a deepening of the problems. The further bureaucratic complication of product delivery will not solve the nod.
Recommendations
The first thing to do is to determine why these products kept coming back for restock during the last four months period. This could come up from the data collected with the techniques mentioned above. Secondly, a change in the Research & Development Department is needed. This department should intensify its efforts to bring innovations for new product development or even in the re-organizing of company’s networks form supply to delivery.
Another thing to do would be to change organizational culture and the way the work force is managed within this company. It can start with the establishment of a system of feedback throughout the company. This would make possible that worker’s voices would be listened. To the labor force would be given a chance to participate actively in the company’s organizational life. Another step here would be to implement a system of incentives for the labor force. This could be a system on a merit-based basis. The result of these two steps would be that the morale of the labor force will boost and their performance will follow. This would greatly, positively, impact company’s productivity.
It will also decrease the timing of delivery of the products and increase the quality of their production. The same system of incentives should be implemented with the management team. To them should be given the possibility of big rewards for new innovative ideas they bring and that have a positive impact company’s market share and positioning.
References
Gomez-Mejia, Luis R.; David B. Balkin and Robert L. Cardy (2008). Management: People, Performance, Change. 3rd edition. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Jones, R. G. (2004). Organizational Theory, Design, and Change: Text and Cases, Fourth Edition. Published by Prentice-Hall, a Pearson Education Company.
Simon, H. (2006). Administrative Behavior. 4th edition. Blackwell Publishing: London.