A project designed to tackle a problem in customer service－ How to improve the service quality of our company

1、A project designed to tackle a problem in customer service How to improve the service quality of our company 论文摘要本研究的主要目的是通过实际运用商务英语课程中所学到的理论知识来提高本公司的售后服务质量，解决客户对我公司服务不满日益增多的问题。作者是冠亚信息科技有限公司浙江分公司下属的一名售后服务工程师。近年来随着本公司业务范围的扩大，客户数目的增多而售后服务却没有及时跟进，导致客户满意度下降，服务质量有所降低，而且在公司的服务工程师间对工作过于紧张的抱怨也增加了！这些问题的主要原因有

2、以下几个方面：服务人员数量不足，服务人员素质良莠不一，维修备件准备不充分。本项目的目标就是针对以上三个问题原因设计出一一对应的解决方案，提高我公司的服务质量，保证甚至提高市场占有份额。项目假设如果我公司有了足够人力资源，服务人员有着专业的服务知识，并且有充分的备件供应，我们的售后服务质量将有很大的提高。项目实施的对象是我公司售后服务部。实施项目主要内容包括招聘足够数量的服务工程师，对所有售后服务人员进行系统专业的服务课程培训，同时购买足够的维修备件，最后通过实际工作中对此项目的直接实施对象-公司的服务工程师和客户的意见反馈的调查来检验项目实施情况。项目实施时间是2006年5月至2006年9月。

3、我们通过以上调研方式得出的结果是令人满意的，现在在客户中间对我们的服务质量有了较满意的评价，而在服务工程师中对工作的抱怨也减少了很多。这说明我们的项目是有着很积极的意义的，达到了当初设计的目标，对公司的发展起到了促进作用，而对我个人来说则锻炼了我的商业问题处理能力和英语实际应用能力，是一个比较完善的项目计划。Abstract This project is designed to improve our companys after-sale service quality. In recent years our companys service quality has not improv

4、ed as quickly as required by the increase of our market share, thus leading to many problems - our clients start complaining about our poor service and our service staff feel very exhausted after work. These problems are very harmful to our company. So it is very important to improve service quality

5、 to keep our market share. I think if we have enough human resources and spare parts, with high quality professional training, things may be different. So we start to investigate-both of our clients and service staff, then decide how much spare parts and new staff are needed, and then request the fu

6、nd from our headquarter to purchase enough spare parts and hire new staff, finally we have qualified training and give our service staff necessary training course. After we executed this project we were happy to see the result was satisfactory, by investigating the direct target of this project the

7、service staff and clients of our company, the dissatisfaction from both of them decreased. So the result was consistent with our initial hypothesis, our clients said our service quality has highly improved. The result proves a correct way to improve after-sale service, I think our companys administr

8、ator will be interested in my project because ensure our current market share and will enlarge it if we do better there after. Table of ContentsPages1. Introduction .1.1 Project Background.1.2 Problem Description1.3 Possible Measures11.12. Project Objective(s)23. Project Rationale and Project Hypoth

9、esis. 3.1 Project Rationale. 3.2 Project Hypothesis24. Activities planed to take place3 4.1 Six Stages of the Plan. 4.2 Flowchart of the Activities5. Critical path and its flow chart5 5.1 Six Stages of the Plan. 5.2 Flowchart of the Activities6. People involved in the activities and their responsibi

10、lities.67. Time-scale of the activities7 7.1 Brief introduction of the time-scale. 7.2 Flowchart of the time-scale.8. Cost consideration.89. Risk Analysis910. Monitoring and Evaluation Plan of the project.1011. Project Framework.1112. Results and Discussion1213. Conclusion121. IntroductionThe introd

11、uction includes three subjects: the project background, the problem description and possible measures. 1.1 Project Background This project was designed to solve the major problem facing our company now. Our company, TopAsia Information Technical Company ZheJiang Branch, is a senior service supply co

12、mpany for our financial customers all around ZheJiang province, our customers are almost in such commercial fields as Bank of China, China Merchants Bank, Bank of Communications etc. Till now we have four service stations in four major cities in ZheJiang province. Our product is our service: we prov

13、ide hardware installation, adjustment and maintenance for our costumers computer-based facility, including ATM (Auto Teller Machine), On-line Inquire Machine, Security Monitor System.1.2 Problem descriptionBecause our companys major product is our service, so the quality of our service is vital for

14、us. In the past five or six years, our customers were very satisfied with our service; they seldom complained about our service. But due to the increasing number of our competitors and higher and higher service quality demand, in recent years, especially form last year we were receiving clients comp

15、lain about our service: we have received three times that our clients dissatisfaction on our product, that was unacceptable for us! As one of our companys senior engineers, I also think it is the time to take some measures to improve our service, reduce our clients dissatisfaction, otherwise we will

16、 lose our market share, even our job。1.3 Possible MeasuresAfter I conducted a deep research on our clients needs and current situation about our company (From 2006 March to April, by visiting four of our companys department managers and administrators), I made a brief design including three possible

17、 methods to improve our service quality, all of which aim to solve the problem efficiently.The first method is to hire more veteran hardware engineers to offer our clients more quickly response speed, more careful working method and better service attitude. The second method is to prepare more spare

18、 parts of our working target in each service station, which will reduce the time of spare parts replacement, increasing our response speed too.The last method is retrain our engineers, teach them standardized service procedure, more efficient and better communication method with the client, that wil

19、l minimize the misunderstanding between the clients，our service engineer, and reduce the dissatisfaction of our customers effectively. (请用具体数字，不要用SOME， SEVERAL等模糊语言)2, Project objective(s)Over recent years our company is growing bigger and bigger and our clients are also much more than before, but a

20、long with these good factors we never stop receiving complaints about our service quality - our clients said that our service quality is poorer than before. At the same time, because of working under high pressure for very long time (lack of service staff), our current service engineers were dissati

21、sfied with the working situation too. In order to ensure our current market position, keeping our company continue to develop, and give our service staff approving working situation to ensure high working efficiency, we must think out a plan to change the disadvantageous position. So I and my collea

22、gues designed a “Customer Service Improvement” project. The main goal of this project is to improve our customer service quality within 8 weeks by recruiting new service engineers, retraining our service staff and enlarging our store of spare parts, at end of this project we will enhance our custome

23、rs satisfaction and further to building up good and close relationship. This project can be easily measureed by comparing the percentage of dissatisfaction before and after our project fulfilled via telephone inquiry. 3, Project rationale and Project Hypothesis3.1 Project RationaleRegarding to the c

24、ustomer services I would like to refer to the books I have read such as “English at work” , “Cross-culture Communication “ and “World Class English for Business Book 1”. From these books and my six years customer service experience I work out some useful rationales for my project as below:1. Success

25、ful communication is essential for our customer service work.2. Successful communication often means just being nice to others. Politeness and being nice to people in this way are essential for all of the service providers.3. The companies often provide services to their clients. Their success depen

26、ds on the good customer service quality.4. The meeting of the customers needs is vital for a companys survival.5. A good customer service quality depends on knowing what customers want and how they feel about the service we offer.6. There are three ways of getting feedback from customers face-to-fac

27、e interviews, interviews on the telephone and a posted written questionnaire.3.2 Project hypothesisIt is hypothesized that if our company has enough service staff, and my colleagues and I have sufficient training lessons of customers service and enough spare parts then we could provide better servic

28、es to customers.4, Activities planned to take placeWhat I need to do now is to think of all the things we will have to do to reach the goal and objectives set up before clearly and carefully. I design a list of all the stages that I have to go through and all the things that need to be done. The pro

29、ject is going to be carried out in six stages as below:4.1 Six Stages of the PlanStage 1.Investigate the needs and wants of our clients and engineersAt first we should find out what the problem is, and the detailed information about our companys status was also needed. So we did a small survey in ou

30、r service staff first, the questions mainly focused on their current working condition and their attitudes of the work, and then we recorded all of their opinions for reference. Second we visited some of our companys administration leaders to get some information about our company, for example, the

31、financial status, the personnel status, the operation status etc. Later we designed some questions for our customers to find out what they most needed of the service we provided. We printed some survey papers for our customers and ask our service staff to complete it when they contact (by face to fa

32、ce meet or telephone) with our clients（The survey is mainly focus on the quality of the service we provide）. At last we got all of the information we need to design the project.Stage 2. Analyze the answer; prepare the project and getting approval Since we got all the information we need, we starting

33、 analyze them, and we carefully designed this project - calculate the finance support we need, how many service engineers we need to hire and how many spare parts we need, etc. Then we delivered it to our supervisor to get approval.Stage 3. Recruit more veteran engineers in human resource market.Onc

34、e our project was accepted by our supervisor, we should start the very important part of our project-hire more veteran service engineers in Ningbos human resource market. This stage may be the most difficult part of our project, because we need enough proper and veteran service engineers, there are

35、many common technicians in Ningbos human resource market, but the veteran engineers who have years of experience in our working field were few. So we prepared to spend two weeks on this stage, to make sure we find the most suitable staff, until we got enough service members we can not go to the next

36、 stage. Stage 4. Purchase enough spare parts from the original manufacturer.Once we have hired enough service staff, we must move on to the next stage-purchase adequate amount of spare parts from the original manufacturer. How many spare parts we need depend on the number of self-service facilities

37、we maintained and the daily working report of the replacement parts, and we should also consider the cost of these spare parts-we should not store many parts that seldom used to waste our limited finance supplies.Stage 5.Retrain our service staff with professional service courses.Since we have enoug

38、h service staff and spare parts, we should give our staff some professional courses of service working. We will train our engineers in our company first, teach them the principle method of the self-service facilities, their functions and repair method etc, these lessons are about the working skills;

39、 then we should find a professional training institution to give us expert training courses of communication skills with people, teach us how to communicate with our clients more effectively and friendly. After these stages Im sure our service quality will improve significantly.Stage 6.Investigate t

40、he result and get the conclusion. After we execute the project, we should find the result of this project and evaluate it. We could investigate our staff and our clients to get some response, just like the first stage. We could use this information to get our conclusion; this will help us in future

41、program designing.5, Critical path and its flow chart 5.1 Critical path analysis of the activitiesThe first and an important step is that we should communicate with our clients and service members at first in order to make a full understanding of each other so as to enable us to implement the projec

42、t. We should identify the wants and needs of our engineers and clients try to know their intention concerning the working condition and the service we provide. If we are sure of our staff and the customer wants and needs, we must to report to the top management to obtain the approval and then go ahe

43、ad to the next step. If our service staff are very satisfied with their current working condition and our customers have no sense of making improvement of our service quality (although it almost cannot happen), it means that we fail the project from beginning.Secondly, before we start to recruit mor

44、e service staff, we must be aware that the amounts and quality we need are sure and correct and clear. More or less amount of new staff and different quality we need both have much negative effect on our project.Thirdly, once we have recruited enough service staff, we should prepare adequate spare p

45、arts of replacement. The total number of spare parts we needs should be careful calculated because these parts have high value, more parts we need more cost we paid, we should find the balance point of cost and benefit.Later, after we have enough service staff and replacement parts, we should give a

46、ll of our service staff professional training courses. This is the key step for us. We should careful prepare the training lessons of working skills and find a truly expert training institution of communication skills. The cost of training courses must consider carefully too.Finally, after the proje

47、ct performed, we must get the response from our engineers and clients, analyze the information, find out both the successful and the failing point of the project, then draw a right and objective conclusion. This is a very important step too, because it will help us prevent from committing the same e

48、rror and make it more perfect and effective in the future project design.6, People involved in the activities and their responsibilitiesOur team has totally eight staff members who look after our companys business including long-term self-service facilities maintenance and new machine retail busines

49、s. All of us will join the procedure of carrying out the project.Fang Ming, our division manager, is in charge of preparing the project, recruit new staff, get response from our service staff, communicate with customers, re-checking all the accounts and prepare the internal training course of workin

50、g skillsYang JianJun, Wang ChangRong, Zhao Jun, Zhu Xufeng, Lin QiangGuo and I are all service engineers, we are colleagues. We are in charge of getting information from our clients of their need and want too. But the main duty we carry is estimate the number of new staff we should recruit, and the

51、number and name of spare parts we need more.Shen Wei is our secretary - she is in charge of the telephone inquiry of our service quality, choose the human resource market, recruit new staff , find a proper expert training institution, contact with the manufacturer to order new spare parts, get respo

52、nse from our clients after the project executed etc.7, Time-scale of the activities7.1 Brief introduce of the time-scale.We have carefully calculated the total time we need to implement the project-it will take about eight to ten weeks. Since we have fifteen clients needed to contact to get their at

53、titude of our service quality and opinion of quality improvement, and they are located in a very large location, the totally time period might be continued a little longer. Anyway, we will do our best to fulfill the project within three months.In week one and week two:l Visit our service staff to fi

54、nd out their opinionsl Contact with our customers to find out their wants and needsl Hold meeting and visiting for chatting when necessaryIn week three:l Estimate the number of new staff and spare parts we need and calculate the financial costl Prepare the whole project carefullyl Report to top mana

55、gement for approvalIn week four:l Prepare the recruiting affairl Prepare the internal training materialIn week five and week sixl Recruit new staffl Prepare and check the internal training materialIn week seven:l Contact the manufacturer of the spare parts affair l Purchase enough and correct spare

56、partsIn week eight and nine:l Find the proper training institutionl Train our service staff in working skill in companyl Train our service staff in professional communication skillsIn week ten:l Perform the project result in daily work l Get response and conclude the project(如此修改是为了保持格式和语言风格一致)7.2 F

57、lowchart of the Time-scale :WEEK SevenWEEK Five to SixWEEK FourWEEK ThreeWEEK One to TwoWEEK Eight to NineWEEK TenSecretary find the training institution Contact the manufacturer and purchase spare partsRecruit new staffPrepare the hiring affairsEstimate cost and design the projectFind out the wants and needPerform the project and get response Perform the internal and communication skill training