Role of Management and Employees in Customer Focused Organizations
Customer focus is vital for every organization in delivering a superior customer experience. Several studies found that an effective communication, strong management commitment, and opportunity to learn are factors that affect employees’ ability to provid
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Role of Management and Employees in Customer Focused Organizations Syazwani Ya, Sarina Muhamad Noor and Noraini Nasirun
Abstract Customer focus is vital for every organization in delivering a superior customer experience. Several studies found that an effective communication, strong management commitment, and opportunity to learn are factors that affect employees’ ability to provide satisfactory services. In addition, customer focus is one of the pillars under quality management that lead into customer satisfaction. Customers’ needs are typically being neglected in the study of the quality movement. Therefore, this research was conducted at three private service providers to ascertain the relationship among management commitment, quality improvement, and employee’s skill toward customer focus initiatives. A set of questionnaires was administered to 162 workers in these service sectors. Results indicate that management commitment and quality improvement have a significant relationship with a customer focus. However, only management commitment and quality improvement explain customer focus in these firms. This research concludes with several suggestions for the improvement of private service providers, especially in their effort to focus more on customer’s satisfaction. Keywords Customer focus Quality management
Employee’s skill
Management commitment
S. Ya (&) S.M. Noor N. Nasirun Faculty of Business Management, Universiti Teknologi MARA Perlis, Perlis, Malaysia e-mail: [email protected] S.M. Noor e-mail: [email protected] N. Nasirun e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 M.A. Abdullah et al. (eds.), Regional Conference on Science, Technology and Social Sciences (RCSTSS 2014), DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-1458-1_22
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1 Introduction Firms improve their position in marketplace through many ways. One of the ways is to engage in customer focus initiatives. There are many advantages of being a customer focused organization, especially in its role in enhancing the innovative characteristics and firms’ performance. This can be achieved through continuously upgrading the product, being innovative, and capitalize on the knowledge (Bose 2012; Vandermerwe 2004) so that firms can grow faster than its competitors. The firm sustainability is also achieved as customer focus that helps in efficient value chain management, enhance communication, and maintain customer’s loyalty (Bose 2012). As suggested by Piecy (1995), to become “indispensable” firm must ensure the effectiveness in handling of complaints as it provides a test for customer focus. A customer’s focused organization requires employees to collaborate with management in order to achieve the outcomes required by customers. It is a process that reflects the attitude in the organization as the challenge requires more than the management order (Piercy 1995). It also requires employees to understand their role in moving toward a customer focused situations. In addition, employees’ atti
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