A case study of Nerds Galore

Background

Nerds galore is a service provider company based in Canada. It was formed in 2000 by Jeeves Stobes. The first office of Nerds Galore was in the garage of the founder, which was later shifted as the years passed. The company employs more than 1000 employees and has branches over 12 major cities in Canada. . Nerds Galore provides Information Technology (IT) services to small and medium based enterprises. The services may vary from troubleshooting systems, repairs in systems, wireless networking repairs and maintenance, hardware and software installations and purchases, and others. During its initial years of establishment, Nerds Galore had targeted small scale businesses with limited networking needs. Over the years, with the business flourishing, Nerds Galore was able to take on medium-sized businesses as well, and their focus was expanded to businesses requiring more than basic technology needs.

Risks associated with Nerds Galore

Since 2009 and beyond, there has been a steady decline in customer satisfaction for NG. The graph has been declining rapidly. In 2013, the figure reached its lowest, recoding the lowest percentage of satisfied customers. This is mainly due to a decline in customer service and incompetency among the staff present. Through a follow up by some key members of NG, it has come to light that the main reason behind this has been high staff turnover, which has caused the customer service to be weak and inefficient. It has also been found out that NG had very poor staff retention. This has led to a decline in overall revenue (Dube, Lester & Reich, 2016).

Risk assessment

To continue providing reliable and robust customer service, the team handling customer relations must be equipped with the latest knowledge of technology, as well as new-end customer handling skills. It has been found out that most of the staff leave due to the pay package being non-satisfactory. The pay package offered by NG is also not top of the line. Due to this, NG has more problems in retaining staff in regions where competition is more extensive, which is mostly urban and semi-urban areas (Crowley, & Jordan, 2017).

It has been found out that the company has many problems internally as well. For instance, it has been challenging in arranging an on-site visit for a customer running small businesses who need maximum technical optimization. Also, it has been challenging to find and hire technicians who are willing to do the job. The majority of the professional staff of the company has been traveling for on-site technical needs, which has made the core technical team ill-staffed. NG has a small core of senior officials who manage company emails and have significant responsibility on them to maintain accounts and customer relations.

Major Risk Sources

The company executives have been observant that the internal revenue of the company had remained intact, even though customer satisfaction had faltered. The income of the company has been falling due to two primary sources:

• Almost all present customers with nerds galore have multiyear contracts with the company, which requires a constant need for service personnel and long-term commitment
• Small businesses (which had made up the majority of the customer base) were indifferent to minor technical glitches in the system and had little concern for maximum system optimization (Setiawan et al., .2016).

Is the new HR strategy helpful?

The new HR strategy, laid out by Gil Bates, has key points that deal with hiring new talents, managing them, retaining the best skills of the company. It also includes the purchasing and implementing fully integrated customer management tools, as well as outsourcing business needs that have some volatile work requirements, and are comparatively heavy than usual; the company can handle it. This approach can help to eliminate significant company risks, which (as summarized by the core management team of NG) include the inability to recruit people with needed skills, high employee departures, incompetence, and loss of business know-how (Jafari, & Asgarnajafi, 2017).

Hiring new talents with competitive knowledge will enable the company to solidify customer relations as well as customer feedback, as well as reduce incompetence (Villegas et al., 2019). Implementing a fully integrated customer management tool will enable the company to minimize workload off the employees, as well as allow their use in other desired areas. Lastly, outsourcing customer handling will ensure that the core team f technicians remain intact during the crisis, and can function at maximum potential.

Conclusion

The problems faced by Nerds Galore may seem small to many. Still, in reality, it is quite complicated and is one of the examples of a company failing to achieve their customer demands due to improper staffing and faulty decision making. The new strategies by the HR team may solve the problems if approved and implemented by the management.