LEADERSHIP AND TRAINING IMPACT ON CUSTOMER SERVICE

Leadership and Training impact on Customer Service

Leadership and Training impact on Customer Service

Problem Statement

The movement to knowledge services has had a profound impact on the nature of work and the people who work within these organizations. In a very real way, the shift to a knowledge service economy has given rise to the “professionalization” of workplace and the structural empowerment of people who work within these organizations. Structural empowerment, unlike traditional approaches to empowerment, is customer- and client-centered empowerment in which the decision-making prerogative of employees, along with the discretion to act on their own, is market driven.

Literature Review

One of the most frequently discussed topics in contemporary management literature is the notion of employee empowerment. Empowerment is generally taken to mean the delegation of decision-making authority and responsibility to lower-level employees in a process of directed authority. However, this traditional top-down approach to empowerment is no longer viable, as the shift to a knowledge service economy in the United States, as elsewhere, gives rise to the growing transformation of twenty-first-century workplaces. Emerging knowledge services, such as business-to-business services, high-tech, medical/ health care, advertising/marketing/public relations, accounting/financial services, engineering services, management consulting, legal services, educational services, and the like constitute the most rapidly expanding segment of the labor force. It has long been acknowledged that customers perform salient roles in service operations. In recognition of the important task activities performed by customers in knowledge services, it has been argued that these participants should be included within the boundaries of organizations as “partial” or temporary employees.

Such an inclusion within the boundaries of the organization, however, renders customers' roles essential but subordinate to the knowledge workers or engagement personnel with whom they directly interact in the alliance. The customer's subordinate position is primarily based on customer alliances being viewed, as previously noted, as agency relationships, in which clients delegate some decision-making authority to knowledge service workers or engagement personnel. This kind of relationship is a germane and unique feature of knowledge service organizations. Fundamentally, the customer in knowledge-based services hires the service worker or engagement personnel and delegates to the engagement personnel the responsibility for gathering and processing information for generating solutions to customer problems or needs. In so doing, the customer surrenders a delimited set of rights to the knowledge service employee. This process is an important form of employee empowerment because it is thought to provide a framework that encourages employees to exercise initiative, spontaneity, and imagination. Consequently, within knowledge service customer alliances, there is a disparity in status between the customer and the knowledge service employee or engagement personnel based largely on the greater legitimate power or right to make decisions bestowed on the employee by the customer. Further disparity in status may also emerge from the unique body of expertise or knowledge possessed by the empowered worker. It seems clear that engagement personnel in customer alliances not only are boundary spanners for the firm but also, more important, represent first-line managers for the ...