Repairing jobs that fail to satisfy
Learning goals
Companies often divide up work as a way to improve efficiency, but specialization can lead to negative conquences. DrainFlow is a company that has effectively ud specialization to reduce costs relative to its competitors’ costs for years, but rising customer complaints suggest the firm’s strong position may be slipping. After reading the ca you will suggest some ways it can create more interesting work for employees. You’ll also tackle the problem of finding people qualified and ready to perform the multiple responsibilities required in the jobs.
Major topic areas
● Job design
● Job satisfaction
● Personalitylock
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rectangle什么意思● Emotional labor
The scenario
DrainFlow is a large residential and commercial plumbing maintenance firm that operates around the United States. It has been a major player in residential plumbing for decades, and its familiar rhyming motto. “When Your Drain Won’t Go, Call DrainFlow,” has been plastered on billboards since the 1960s.
Lee Reynaldo has been a regional manager at DrainFlow for about 2 years. She ud to work for a newer competing chain, Lightning Plumber that has been drawing more customers from DrainFlow. Although her job at DrainFlow pays more, Lee isn’t happy with the way things are going. She’s noticed the work environment just isn’t as vital or energetic as the environment she saw at Lightning.
cidianLee thinks the problem is that employees aren’t motivated to provide the type of customer rvice Lightning Plumber employees offer. She recently nt surveys to customers to col
lect information about performance, and the data confirmed her fears. Although 60 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with their experience and would u DrainFlow again, 40 percent felt their experience was not good, and 30 percent said they would u a competitor the next time they had a plumbing problem.
Lee is wondering whether DrainFlow’s job design might be contributing to its problems in retaining customers. DrainFlow has about 2,000 employees in four basic job categories: plumbers, plumber’s assistants, order processors, and billing reprentatives. This structure is designed to keep costs as low as possible Plumbers make very high wages, whereas plumber’s assistants make about one-quarter of what a licend plumber makes. Using plumber’s assistants is therefore a very cost-effective strategy that has enabled DrainFlow to easily undercut the competition when it comes to price. Order processors make even less than assistants but about the same as billing processors. All work is very specialized, but employees are often dependent on another job category to perform at their most efficient level.
madness
Like most plumbing companies, DrainFlow gets business mostly from the Yellow Pages and the internet. Customers either call in to describe a plumbing problem or submit an online request for plumbing rvices, receiving a return call with information within 24 hours. In either ca, DrainFlow’s order processors listen to the customer’s description of the problem to determine whether a plumber or a plumber’s assistant should make the rvice call. The job is then assigned accordingly, and a rvice provider goes to the location when the job has been completed, via cell phone a billing reprentative relays the fee to the rvice rep, who prents a bill to the customer for payment. Billing reprentatives can take customer’s credit card payments by phone or e-mail an invoice for online payment.
The problem
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artifact>samprasAlthough specialization does cut costs significantly, Lee is worried about customer dissatisfaction. According to her survey, about 23 percent of customer contacts ended in no rvice call becau customer were confud by the diagnostic questions the order pr
ocessors asked and becau the order processors did not have sufficient knowledge or skill to explain the situation. That means fully one in four people who call DrainFlow to hire a plumber are wor than dissatisfied: they aren’t customers at all! The remaining 75 percent of calls that did end in a customer rvice encounter resulted in other problems.
The most frequent complaints Lee found in the Customer surveys were about respon time and cost, especially when the wrong person was nt to a job. A plumber’s assistant cannot complete a more technically complicated job. The appointment has been rescheduled, and the customer’s time and the staff’s time have been wasted. The resulting delay often caud customers in the situations to decline further contact with DrainFlow-many of them decided to go with Lightning Plumber.英文字母26个发音及读法
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