Reflection of Service Breakdown at a Company
Once in a company at which I used to work, service breakdown occurred. In particular, there was a failure of the firm to meet the needs of customers. The company was a human resource consultancy firm, whose services involved the provision of technical advice and outsourced services in the human resources field to clients. In a period of a month, the company failed to meet its goals and fulfill contractual agreements with various clients on time. The crisis led to constant complaints from the clients demanding answers and refunds of fees and money for services not rendered or poor-quality results. Initially, the firm’s leadership did not handle the relationships between clients and customer representatives well. The managers did not communicate to the client firms about the problem in time and effectively. The clients expected the firm to deliver the services that they had paid for in time, but they received neither the services nor an explanation from the company’s leadership initiatives. After about a week, however, the firm’s management sought to address the problem actively by calling the clients to acknowledge the problem and reassure them that it was doing everything possible to alleviate the problem.
The primary cause of the breakdown in services was a failure of performance effectiveness and productivity at the level of teams in the company’s daily operations. Nonetheless, the problems that were the underlying causes were a lack of training and tools and low motivation among employees. The firm’s leadership had failed to provide adequate and up-to-date training for employees and offer appropriate levels and schemes of compensation for employees’ work. The product of these deficiencies was low employee engagement in work, which showed low productivity, poor performance, poor leadership, and poor goal-setting in teams.