Introduction
The reason for conducting this research is to understand how service organisations embrace Customer Service Management (CSM). My research topic is customer service management in service organisations. CSM covers customer satisfaction, service quality, brand loyalty, relationship management, process, people and physical evidence. The service organisation which is under study in this research is Duke Children’s Hospital.
Literature Review
Relationships Management
An organisation is a group of people who work together with coordinated efforts to achieve certain objectives or goals. Organisational goals and objectives are of various categories and it is this variation of the goals and objectives which classify organisations into three main categories namely profit making; service based and social responsibility based organisations.
Management is about planning, coordinating and controlling organisational resources so as to facilitate the achievement of organisational goals and objectives in an efficient and effective manner.
The nature of management therefore only allows for the top leadership of an organisation to act as the drivers of the organisation in a way which facilitates the organisation to achieve its goals and objectives, including the management of organisational change (Murray, Poole & Jones, 2006, pp.45-69).
Relationship management is the coordination of the interactions which take place within an organisational setting. The aim of relationship management is to foster excellent communication based on mutual understanding.
Relationship management also aims at ensuring that employees of an organisation relate with each other well. It aims at minimizing any friction between employees, which may lead to poor service delivery (Karimi, Somers & Gupta, 2001).
Organisations need to manage the relationships especially between the upper level management and the lower level or junior employees. Organisations which aspire to attain their objectives usually follow the human relations approach to relationship management as opposed to the scientific approach, which sees employees as tools to be managed to produce desired outcomes.
The human relations approach to relationship management on the other hand views employees as social beings with feelings, and therefore the need of handling them with courtesy (David,1989),
Customer Satisfaction
This entails providing goods and services which match customers’ needs and purchasing power. Customer satisfaction is also the ability of an organisation to meet the needs of the customers. Customer satisfaction involves providing goods and services of high quality in an efficient manner.
It also involves the pricing of the goods and services in a manner which is friendly to the customers. Customers derive their satisfaction from a product or a service of if the product or service is worth the amount of money the customers pays for the same (Cheung & Lee, 2003).
Brand Loyalty
A brand is a qualifying aspect of a product or service. Organisations brand their products and services with a view of capturing the attention of potential customers. Brand loyalty refers to the extent to which customers have passion and interest in a particular product or service due to the way the product or service is branded (Tompkins, 1998).
High brand loyalty means that the customers prefer that product or service over all the others. Low brand loyalty means that the passion of customers in a particular product or service is not guaranteed and the customers may be easily swayed to purchasing other products or services.
Service Quality
This is the provision of high quality services by an organisation. Focusing on quality aims at ensuring that customers get the value of their money in any service provided to them.
Service quality is related to an organisational overall strategy in that high quality goods and services would enables an organisation increase its customer satisfaction. This leads to increase in sales and enables the organisation to meet its financial objective of expanding to new markets (Carraher, 2005).
Process
This refers to the activities which take place in the provision of services. Good processes are the ones which focus on quality as well as those which allow for the efficient utilization of resources by an organisation. Good processes are not complex but are easy to adopt and change depending on the situation (Carraher, 2005).
Processes include things like administration, type of resources used either manual or technological, monitoring and evaluation and feedback analysis. Good processes enable organisations to not only satisfy the customers but also create a good working environment for the employees, thus maximizing their productivity (Michael & Ferrell, 1996).
People
In an organisational context, people are taken to mean employees and the stakeholders of an organisation. An organisation must ensure that it puts in place a good public relations strategy so that it can gain good reputation both among the employees and the stakeholders.
Organisations should labour to ensure fair employee practice as well as corporate social responsibility to foster its relationship with its external environment (Parasuraman & valerie, 1985).
Physical Evidence
This refers to verifiable indicators of an organisational functions and processes. Organisations operate in real world not in virtual space and to this regard; there must be an evidence of the success of the organisations.
Some of indicators of organisational success include growth and expansion, customer satisfaction, increased customer base, good reputation of an organisation as well as other indicators such as mergers and acquisition, and internationalization of an organisation (Lee, 1996).
Methodology
Research involves collection of data, facts and information for various social, political and economic purposes. In collection of data, various research designs are utilised. Qualitative method uses samples of the population to represent the whole. Data collected is non-numerical and descriptive in nature.
Quantitative research method on the other hand is concerned with quantification of social phenomena, and usually deals with large or whole populations. Data is collected in statistical or numerical form. Qualitative and quantitative research designs are sometimes used as a continuum in that they complement each other (Newman & Benz, 1998).
In this research, the methodology used was that of interviewing. Apart from interviewing, I also read about the organisation’s customer service management practices in its website.
Interviews involved the mailing of questionnaires to the Dukes’ Children’s Hospital managers through their email addresses. The questionnaires were designed so as to get the views of the managers in regards to the issues of customer service management in their organisation.
The interview comprised ten heads of operations, either current or former employees of the hospital located in various locations or branches of the hospital. Their names and contacts were obtained from the company’s employee’s data base. After getting the names and their contacts, they were requested to participate in the interview at their will, which they consented to.
They were explained about the purpose of the interview and assured that the information was to remain confidential, and would not be used to accord or deny them any privileges as employees or former employees of the organisation. They were also guaranteed anonymity in the analysis of the information which they gave.
This was done so as to ensure that they participated in the interview without any form of biases. A copy of the questionnaire attached as an appendix.
Limitations of the methodology
One limitation of the method was that some questions were retuned unanswered, especially because the participants did not understand them. This was because there was nobody to give clarifications on the questions and also to probe to get the meaning of the participants.
The other limitation was that some of the participants did not receive the interview because it went to the spam instead of the inbox. Due to this, three out of ten participants did not actually participate in the interview. This compromised the validity and reliability of the survey.
How Dukes children’s hospital has implemented CSM
From the data obtained from the interviews, it emerged that the internal business process which Duke Children’s hospital focused on in the development of the balanced scorecard was quality improvement.
This was aimed at ensuring that the hospital improved its quality of performance; so as to improve the stakeholder relationship. One of the measures taken was to introduce the use of technology in its services, especially in data and information management in the organisation.
The organisation introduced a system which linked the payers and the other staff who dealt with the clients directly. The system involved the generation of an automated data base for all the clients. This data base comprised of information for all the clients including their date of birth, type of service they received, their diagnosis, policy number and the physician who attended them.
The system was designed in a manner that after the processing of client’s details, they were faxed directly to the payers, who faxed them back immediately together with the notification number. The aim was to increase the number of notifications per hour and reduce the time for each notification.
Another process was the alignment of the clinicians and the administrators, to enable them work on a single platform of enabling the organisation attain its mission and vision.
Their alignment however led to a gap in communication between them, especially in regards to the issue of how to implement the balanced scorecard whereby the administrators felt that they still had a bigger say in its implementation than the other staff; but with time, the gap was eventually bridged through sharing information on how best to implement the balanced scorecard and the role to be played by each and every employee of the organisation.
In order to improve on quality, the organisation introduced a training system, which was employee tailored. There were training for the nurses, the clinicians and the administrators on how to improve on quality.
Each of them was trained on service delivery as well as on team work and how to relate well with others in the workplace. The overall objective was to create an organisational culture which enhanced learning from each other so as to improve the quality of services offered by the organisation.
The research also discovered that the organisation was using an automated system which enhanced the efficiency of the organisation by reducing the rate of denial by the payer from 15% to 1% or less. By so doing, the organisation increased its efficiency. The patients were also happy with the idea because it reduced the time they spend before being attended to.
This led to an increase in customer satisfaction of 4.7, up from 4.3 on a 5.0 scale. The hospital also reduced its cost per case form $14, 889 in 1996 to $ 10,500 in the year 2000. The alignment of the administrators and the clinicians also led to the increase in the net margin from -$11 million in 1996 to+$4 million in the year 2000.
The training of the staff (the nursing unit) improved their performance from 71% in 1996 to 100% in the year 2000. The creation of an organisational culture which enhanced learning improved the staff satisfaction from 1.5 in 1996 to 4.0 on a scale of 5.0 in the year 2000.
This staff satisfaction was accompanied by improved staff performance, which led to a decline in the rate of readmission of patients from 7% in 1996 to 3% in 2000 (Niven, 2006).
Conclusion
The paper was a research based on the topic of customer service management in service organisations. The organisation which the research was based on is Dukes children hospital. Some of the customer service management concepts discussed include relationship management, service quality, people, and process among others. The research used electronic questionnaires emailed to the staff of the hospital.
The analysis of the information indicates that the hospital has managed to effectively enhance customer service management, especially in the area of efficiency and quality improvement. However, the organisation needs to do a lot to boost its relationship with the social environment because nothing it has done as far as corporate social responsibility is concerned.
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