A Multi-national company which is in the business of manufacturing and distributing agricultural equipment to local and international clients employees over 8000 employees and caters to the demand of over 1 million customers world-wide. The company has presence in Australia, Vietnam, India, Oman and Nigeria, typically the countries whose income lies on the agricultural goods. In the recent times the company is facing a couple of problems in the communication area. The problems as described by the board are: Ineffective use of social media, blogs, wikis, social network to support the teams to share ideas and knowledge, at the same time inability to collect customer feedback and review on the quality of goods are the major communication challenges faced by the company.
The underlying purpose of the report here is to analyse and conduct a literature review on the issues and make recommendation on how to improve the existing situation along with the parameters to evaluate the success or failure of the recommendation. The report will highlight here plethora of strategies to make the best use of Social media and the feedback in improving customer satisfaction and the quality of service provided by the organization.
In the present day, the company is facing troubles in managing communication in the organization which is hampering the productivity and the efficiency of the organization big time. The major issues at hand are:
In a world, where social status is everything, it is really important to leverage the social media platform at its full potential (Serrat, 2017). Communication is the heart and soul of an organization, ineffective communication for a longer period of time in an organization and bring down any company within a day, thus it becomes important to understand the importance of social media as an effective tool of communication (Cook, 2017). Social media can be used to drive employee engagement, creating development goals for the employees and empowering them by considering their views represented on the social media. On a platform which is so vast, abundant and highly transparent, it becomes absolutely numbing if the organization is unable to take leverage of the platform (Tuten & Solomon, 2017).
Social media platform serve as a great channel for bottom up communication which has high importance in engaging and empowering the employees. Facebook and other social media platforms have realized the importance of social network for businesses thus have designed a separate platform catering to the businesses, the platform helps in community building which then becomes a breeding ground of great ideas and a forum for cogent discussion(Kasemasp, 2017). Thus, ineffective use of social media not only just takes the company on a downward trajectory, but also hurts its productivity severely (Raider & Krackhardt, 2017).
Client feedback and review has been gaining popularity right from the evolution of the business environment and the coherent understanding of the client importance to businesses (Zald, 2017). Feedback of client is extremely helpful in knowing where the company has been going wrong, what are the loopholes and areas of improvement which the company can work upon to bring a change in customer experience (Sundet, 2017). In the absence of client feedback the organization stand alone with no clear cut direction to move forward. They do not have a clear defined path or the areas of improvement to work upon; this masks the growth of the company big time. However in other case, when the clients’ feedback is being collected and assessed, the company gains a lot (Paino & Jabar, 2017). The constructive feedback from the client helps in assessing the gaps or lacunae in the business process or policies or the areas of improvement in the existing product, which can help the company and customer thus creating a situation of win-win (Kraut, 2017). Another big advantage of collecting client feedback is the trust the company develops with the customers after comprehending on their concerns or grievances and working towards them. This ensures that the company grows and ensures business momentum (Church & Waclawski, 2017). In the dynamic business environment, where every industry is getting competitive it becomes extremely important to listen to the client and comprehend the solution according, thus building an everlasting relationship and embarking a journey of sustained relationship(Chopra & Rajendran, 2017).Thus, in the present case, the organization has no idea if it is doing good or bad for its customers, which in actual worsens the condition of the organization and hampers its growth and productivity in the current business ecosystem(Argyris, 2017).
Conclusion
The case study here is based on an MNC which manufactures and distributes agricultural equipment. The company has a presence in 5 countries, viz, Australia, Vietnam, India, Nigeria and Oman, serving over 1 million customers worldwide. In the recent past the company has been facing quite a trouble in managing its communication and challenges in collecting and assessing client feedback for the continuous improvement in the business practices and product offering.
One of the biggest challenges the company has been facing is ineffective usage of social media platforms like Facebook, Wiki, Web blogs and other such channels to engage its employees, initiate a conversation or collating their views about the company business operation and process. This has been hampering the company severely as social media is one platform which is transparent and ensures effective communication between the company and its employees. The ineffectiveness to leverage the platform is breaking the motivation of the team and putting constraint on the continuous learning, growth and development within the organization.
Another major challenge at hand, which by all means is one of the biggest obstacles towards the goal of business momentum, is the inability to collect and assess the customer feedback and grievances. In absence of the client feedback the company becomes totally clueless about its future vision, goals and objectives. The company gets a perception that no feedback is good feedback and they keep on doing what they have been doing, which hampers the organization drastically. They are unable to innovate, make changes in their product line, which leaves them far behind in the competitive industry. Thus, it is really important to address these issues first hand, and prevent the company from falling into the trap of downward trajectory.
According to the case study, the organization’s inability to effectively use social media as a channel of effective communication is posing big challenges in managing its internal communication with its employees and also unable to help them with task management.
Communication plays a very important role in any business organization, not only it is effective in conveying the message but at the same time it can also be used as a tool to engage with the employee, which further helps in improving his productivity thus reducing employee turnover within the organization(Schein, 2017)
Blogs are an excellent medium to communicate with the employees. Blogs can be used in plethora of different ways to increase the engagement, sharing quality information, communicate with the target group and skill enlargement (Farmer, 2017). Human resource can effectively use this channel to consistently post updates on the new policies for the employees, or to post any new information with relevant content. This information thus reaches the employees quickly, and the comprehensiveness of the platform helps in easy understanding of the conveyed points. Blogs can also be used as an effective tool to conduct Q&A session with the employees; this Q&A will help in building engagement with the employees and also help the organization in knowing certain areas of improvement about the organization. The company can also use blogs to convey new trends in the industry, or new tools which the employees can use to work effectively with enhanced productivity (Decker & Lacy, 2017).
Besides this, Blogs are an excellent medium to promote learning and development within the organization and also to motivate the employees. Example being, Senior managers or leaders who have been working in the industry or the company for too long can share their views and insight on how to handle a client, or his success story or how he tackled a challenge, or his learning of the industry. This information can be extremely useful for people who have just joined the organization and are highly uncertain of the growth and other such things. Further, the usage of blogs can also be encouraged in the organization by asking employees to post blogs to educate their peer, colleague or even convey a thing or two to the senior managers. This will also help in bring a sense of pride in the employee who has been writing blog and would also propel other employees to share their thoughts, views, ideas or any other useful information. Thus, Blogs are extremely effective tool of communication offered by the technology pertaining to Web 2.0(Leonardi & Vaast, 2017).
It is the monitoring and evaluation of the Web 2.0 tools which makes it an inevitable platform. The success or failure can be measured by the number of people reading the blogs, follower count, reviews, sharing or any other form of engagement with the shared content. Yammer, Jibe and connections can be used as social media tool for micro –blogging (Kane, 2017). Another way of pushing the Blog culture is to link it with the KRA (Key rating area of the employee).
Facebook has been divulging a lot of money towards improving its Facebook for business division to make it a useful platform for the employees. Facebook can be easily used as an effective social media platform for employees by building strong communities of employees who can then work together to create a collaborative environment. Facebook can also be used as an effective platform to convey any important or urgent information to large group of people at one time, the easy accessibility to the platform and its employee friendly design makes the communication easily consumable(Quirke, 2017). Further, the company can build small group or teams through the platform and send highly targeted messages to one group at the go. Facebook as a platform can also be used to make any organizations content viral on the platform, also when there are teams working in different countries, Facebook helps in sharing the same information with all of them at the same time. Thus, beside the point of community building, the platform also has usage in high content targeting, creating collaborative group and projects for people and communicating a message over a short period of time to the employees. The easy accessibility, designing, user interface makes the platform highly relevant to the organization (Cornelissen & Cornelissen, 2017).
Wikipedia has been in vogue since the early 2000, when it was launched. It is an excellent platform to fill in the information on a particular topic, project, industry, company or any other field of interest. These wikis can be used to train and make the employees learn some important concept during their induction or training. Wikis serve as a platform for learning and development of the employees. It is also advised to keep the language and structure simple on the Wikipedia page to make the employee understand the content in an effective manner. Thus, Wiki serve as a good source for facilitating knowledge to a large group of employees in the organization, also with the option of adding more relevant information, thus expanding the horizon of learning and growth (Zhang, Guo, Hu & Liu, 2017).
Client feedback is extremely important for any organization; inability to collect and assess the client feedback hampers the organization severely. Some of the strategies are suggested to collect the employee feedback and use it to its optimum utilization:
Social media has a reach of around 3.75 billion people worldwide, which makes it a highly effusive channel. The company is advised to be really active on social media and conduct social media monitoring at all times(Kim, Choi & Verma, 2017) A dedicated team’s job will only be to listen to what the customers are talking about their company. In the case, when the feedback received is good, thank the customer and give him an assurance of the same quality and standards in the product. In the case, where the client feedback is bad, comprehend his concern, appreciate him for lending valuable time to speak about the company for its development and address is concern then and there and convert him into a loyal customers by addressing his grievances(Moreira, 2017) Thus, social listening will the company in building relationship with the customers and also to ensure that the company is working on the lacunae in their product and services, leading to an environment of sustained innovation and improvement.
Undoubtedly one of the most effective channel to collect, assess the feedback and use it for improvement in the company products and services. It is the responsibility of the organization to engage with the clients and collect feedback from them with the use of questionnaire, social media, email or event Face to face meetings (Al-Weshah, 2017). The data can then be feed into the CRM which can be used as a base to tackle the challenge at hand. The information will also help the organization in removing the obstacle once for all and thus preventing any further problem due to the same reason. The company has to create a dedicated CRM team whose only purpose is to collect the feedback, build relationship with the customers. Solve his query or concern and create a database of such problems to use it as a base while creating future business strategies (Chen, Lu, Tu, 2017).
An angry or an irate customer first comes to the company website to report the incident, his concern or any other problem. If at the very same instance he is given a resolution, the company is saved from getting a tarnished image on the social media channels (Winston, 2017). Thus, it is very important to have a dedicated team of 24*7 which is active on the company’s website to listen to the problem of customer and solve his query. A First call resolution or FCR has to be the KRA of such customer support team. The feedback can thus be shared with the management and the relevant teams handing the particular product line or service for bridging the gap between the customer expectation and product offering (Sampson & Spring, 2012).
It is not necessary that every Feedback the company gets is bad, there is a paradigm shift in the reasons why customers gives feedback to the companies. They want the company to learn, to grow, and help them to design products which can better suit the needs of the customers, this is called as constructive feedback and is very important for the organization. In cases, where the customer is appreciating the company, request him to write a testimonial on the company’s website to build positive brand advocacy and a sustained relationship with the client. In any of the case, the important point is “ACKNOWLEDGEMENT”, organization has to ensure that it acknowledges each and every feedback it receives from the client and takes it in a positive manner. Convey him the required plan of Action on the issue resolution along with the time frame required to solve the issue. This will go a long way in building trust, transparency and a long term relationship with the clients.
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