Case study 'THE CALL CENTRE AT TENGO LTD' Essay

Case study 'THE CALL CENTRE AT TENGO LTD' - Essay Example To facilitate customers, Tengo has customer center that provide various services to its customers such contact centre for spare parts, accessories and for extended product warranties etc. The customer center also provides technical support service for their existing customers; and point for customer complaints. Tengo customer service centre also conducts field enquiries about Tengo products. Tengo contact centre is situated in green-field site situated in the outskirts of large town in the Midlands. This location also has other customer service centre that exerts considerable pressure on labor market. Tengo holds good reputation for paying appreciable monetary compensation to its employees; however, it does not have positive remarks regarding its employment policies terms and conditions. In recent past, Tengo on evaluation of HR mainly in customer centre concluded that centre is overstaffed conduced rationalization and restructuring. Year-end customer feedback has reflected a decline in service quality and HR manager is concerned to explore the element of people and process in this poor performance. According to Marr & Neely (2004, p.7) nowadays the customers of call center are looking for more effective and efficient customer service. ... The report will also conclude with overall remarks on restructuring at Tengo customer centre. THE CHANGES AT TENGO CUSTOMER CENTRE In the periodic HR planning exercise in head-office, HR manager concluded customer centre being overstaffed with respect to its overall growth. For the purpose, staff rationalization and restructuring was conducted. The restructuring move resulted in many changes in the customer centre; broadly can be defined under following three heads (Coucke, Pennings, and Sleuwaegen, 2007): Reduction in the number of jobs Strict demarcation of boundaries of jobs Cost incurred on automated product support system for customer. Interactive systems automated systems aimed to get two benefits of improved quality of service and reduced training and development of employees. Under new structure, entire staff of customer centre was categorized into levels; Level 1 constituted entry-level positions dealing with customer complaints. Majority of advisors were categorized under L evel 2 across various departments. Level 3 advisors accounted those employees assigned task of dealing with detailed technical problems CONSEQUENTIAL IMPACT Consequential impact of the HR move understudy resulted negatively. This new structure that defined boundaries ended the employees’ movement across the departments; resulted in ending up of learning and development opportunities available to employees with rotation across department. Overall, call centre job has low intrinsic value (Sako, 2006). Call centre jobs are classified into two groups of ‘quality oriented and ‘quantity oriented. As the name implies, former is characterized with more multifaceted and individualized interaction of call agent with customer