Title: Effect of staff productivity on customer satisfaction
Introduction
Training is an extremely valuable tool in positively impacting employees' self-esteem. Giving people the opportunity to learn and expand their inventory of skills increases their sense of self-worth and self confidence and makes them more valuable to the organization. Timely, effective training is one of the most positive motivators in the workplace today. Unfortunately, low self-esteem employees are the least likely to be involved in new skill training and development (1998). Most of the training they receive tends to be a "remedial review" of past learning. Regularly scheduled, basic, fundamental review is an important component of training, but ongoing exposure to new skills and new tasks is also necessary. In the real world, low self-esteem employees are rarely selected for new projects. When they receive additional tasks, they are picking up the routine and boring tasks of others, as the more productive employees are freed up to do bigger and better things ( 1998). Training is one of the measures to improve the performance and productivity of the personnel. It is vital for the company to improve the employees’ performance and productivity because a staff that performs poorly and produces a little can cause the business to lose precious clients. The clients that transferred to other business are not satisfied with the way they are served by the staff. There is a relationship between customer satisfaction and productivity of the personnel. The paper wants to go deeper into determining the effect of staff productivity on customer satisfaction.
Literature review
Productivity and its importance to organizations
The employment skills of the twentieth century are not necessarily critical for organizational innovation in the information and electronic age. In fact, the ones people have known as marketable skills from their success in the management of traditional organizations, especially the ones of the twentieth century, are of little use in knowledge organizations (2002). Skills that will be the most important for knowledge organizations are those that are associated with the intellect of the individual. Presently, these skills are hard to teach and harder to assess. The challenge that institutions of higher learning worldwide will face will be their ability to equip their pupils with these creativity skills. Those universities around the world that will succeed in devising and revising curricula emphasizing these skills will be able to take over the leadership of the education for the twenty-first century and beyond (2002).
Employees possessing much needed skills will enable knowledge organizations to engage in ingenious actions to bring about innovation and productivity. As the size of organizations expanded and required recruitment of outside help, managers continued to uphold the family model as the way to organize and manage ventures with outside members. In such organizations work is designed so that almost everyone in the organization is able to perform, without any concern for efficiency, any and all types of work needed to run the organization. As the workforce changes and encompasses a wider variety of employee backgrounds, it is imperative that organizations entail more flexibility and labor interchangeability so that production may be maximized. The gains in productivity rise not because people switch jobs frequently but because of the satisfaction people feel in having selected a job they like and the power they have to pick another task if they do not like what they are doing (2002). Productivity is an important topic. National economies, industries, individual organizations, and parts of individual organizations are all concerned about productivity. Concern about productivity is not limited to profit-making organizations. Government agencies, educational institutions, nonprofit organizations, and the military are all interested in productivity and its improvement (1990).
It is easy to understand why productivity, especially productivity improvement, is so important. If market-based economies, industries, or individual organizations become more productive, they provide better products and services at lower cost and thus remain competitive, increase their market share, and in general have more resources to work with (1990). Productivity is important in all aspects of living, not only in business. Productivity helps in making sure that the organization will offer a much better product or service. It will help the organization maintain its internal or external competitiveness since more products or services are given at a much faster time and with lesser instances of errors. Productivity helps in improving an organization’s image to the public.
Monitoring performance and productivity
Developmental organizations embrace performance management processes that enable employees to become their greatest asset. When managers function as performance coaches, they become trainers, confronters, mentors, and counselors, providing positive feedback and reinforcement to improve skills and competencies that ultimately enhance overall employee performance. Performance management functions as an integral part of a comprehensive development strategy, although too few organizations subscribe to this philosophy ( 2000). . Hence, the business world overflows with mediocre, stagnant, or failing organizations that stubbornly or ignorantly overlook their employees' potential. We believe that well-designed and well-executed performance management provides an excellent vehicle for promoting continuous employee and organizational growth and development ( 2000). Managers judge their subordinates during formal performance appraisals, evaluating quality, measuring performance, and discussing strategies for improvement and development. Given these responsibilities, it makes sense that managers are held responsible for development (2000). Every employee’s performance should be monitored and evaluated so that the weak spots they have can be analyzed. Monitoring the performance and productivity of the client is vital in making the client loyal to the company. It can be used as a way to check whether personnel can satisfy the needs of the client. Monitoring the performance can help the company determine what to do to make the client loyal.
Loyalty and satisfaction
Business growth can stem from mergers and acquisitions, price increases, new products or services, geographic expansion, new customers, or additional purchases by existing customers. Of the three, the last represents the most stable platform for long-term growth. Companies have to do much to develop a customer centric culture. Yet few collect the information required to quantify the asset value of their customer base (2000). A recent Management Consulting survey of large U.S. companies found that few CEOs or boards spend even a small fraction of their time looking at data on their own customers even if their research departments do conduct the research despite the amount of lip service given to customer focus. Management has explanations for this situation, including such arguments that there is no way to get the true facts, that market research is vague and imprecise, or that senior managers generally don't have time for this stuff but must instead focus on the balance sheet and the bottom line ( 2000).Growth of a company means that it has to make sure that it has a good relationship with clients. A company needs to develop clients that are loyal to them.
Having client loyalty may be a good or bad thing depending on the different circumstances the firm faces. It might sound like heresy, but the fact is that customer loyalty is not always good. If, for instance, a company is losing money in serving a particular set of customers, the last thing they want to do is to invest in forging long-term relationships with the clients. And if the company's customers' loyalty is to old products and services, they may be lulled into a false sense of security that leaves them vulnerable to new competitive threats. A blind devotion to the concept of loyalty can be dangerous. On the other hand, ignoring loyalty is even more dangerous (2002).). Companies that give little or no attention to building loyalty among their customers are doomed to eventual decline. Either they will succumb to terminal customer churn or, more likely, they will lose their best customers to a competitor with a more compelling value proposition. People see such fates played out again and again in the business world, as once prosperous companies’ take their market positions and customers for granted. Remember that many of the original 1955 Fortune 500 companies who were once the most powerful enterprises in the business world no longer exist. They had loyal customers at one time, but they lost them (2002).
Loyalty is a concern for the firm because it creates the future scenario for the company. When a company has loyal clients it will achieve its desires to grow, increase profit and gain competitive advantage. When the company has no loyal client they may end up having a bad status and in the end it may cease its operations. Customer loyalty comes from the ability of the company to generate the consumer’s desire to purchase again in the company. It comes from the capability of the company to satisfy its clients. When there is a high client share and frequent returns of specific clients, it means that the company gains the client trust and the client becomes loyal to the company.
The need to satisfy clients
The essence of the quality movement is meeting or exceeding customers' expectations; and those expectations are largely established with the customers by salespeople. Sales and service are the front and back of the same hand, and salespeople must take responsibility for the total customer experience, whether they are the service person as well, or serving as a liaison and advocate for the customer for another person or department (1998). Effective salespeople will pay the price to gain significant product and service knowledge so they can set appropriate expectations with customers. Effective sales professionals go for no deal the minute they suspect that mutual benefit is in question. This not only preserves the relationship and possible future business, but it sends a rare message to the customer that the relationship and mutual benefit are more important to the organization than any mere transaction. Another benefit to salespeople is that it keeps them out of the obsolete linear numbers game, a quantity paradigm created by investing only serious quality time with customers whose needs are clear and current, and where there is high probability of a long-term relationship (1998).
This is further enhanced by identifying in advance the characteristics of the company's ideal long term customers and targeting only those that meets their criteria. Think what the company's personal satisfaction level for sales would be if most lengthy interactions led to a strong, lifelong customer relationship. This approach eliminates the stressful burnout of battling objections with marginally qualified prospects in win-lose situations. Managing a customer relationship strategy that covers the full range of collaborative-to-transactional customers is difficult. Segment and account within-segment priorities must be clearly articulated to, and accepted by, key personnel. Strategic partners are the strategic priority, with a goal of penetrating and differentiating the business and selling model to achieve 100-percent customer satisfaction and joint profit improvement (1998).
An organization may grab at diverse opportunities that happen to look good in the present without tying them into a long-term strategy for planned growth consistent with the organization's mission. When this happens, the organization becomes diversified beyond its strength, placing a strain on resources. After a while, it is attempting to do so many things, it becomes less effective at doing them, and frequently even less effective at doing what it originally set out to do (1991). When organizations that are funded solely by generated income fail to satisfy clients, they feel it. That is why most good organizations spend a substantial amount of time and money on trying to find out exactly what it is that their customers need and what their level of satisfaction is regarding current offerings (1991). The need to satisfy clients is eminent in every business. The clients and their satisfaction with the company is an important measure of the business’ success. If one client is dissatisfied with the company, it has to reconsider its performance and productivity, losing more than one client due to dissatisfaction can be a reason for panic within the company.
Research questions
Generally the paper intends to find out about the effect of staff productivity on customer satisfaction. Specifically, the study will try to answer the following questions:
Aims and objectives
The aims and objectives of the study include:
2. To determine the actions taken by business so that they can have productive personnel.
3. To determine and assess the effects of motivation to staff productivity.
4. To understand how can a company give satisfaction to its clients
5. To know what factors are considered in concluding the company has indeed satisfied its clients.
6. To understand how productivity can affect the deliverance of satisfaction.
Methodology
Research sample
The participants or the sample are various employees of big companies that motivate their employees to be productive. As much as possible the respondents should at least have been serving in the company for more than one year so that accurate data can be achieved. This sample is appropriate because they have the knowledge to give the effects of staff productivity on customer satisfaction. The study will use the probability sampling because the results of the use of such method will not be of limited value. In probability sampling method each member of the population has non-zero probability of being selected. The specific sampling technique that will be used is the random sampling. The sample size will be around 30 participants.
Data collection and analysis
Data will be collected through primary and secondary sources of data. The primary source of data will come from questionnaires that will be conducted with the help of the respondents. The study shall use questionnaires methods to gather pertinent data. The questionnaire will be made in such a way that the respondents will spend less time in answering it. The secondary source of data will come from researches done by the organization, previous studies and surveys. Data that will be initially gathered will be analyzed through frequency distributions. This procedure of analyzing the data will give way to reviewing the data categories and the number of referrals in each category.
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