Organisational Schizophrenia
Impact on Customer Service Quality
- Gopal K. Gureja - Management Consultant
Watch the author talk about 'Organisational Schizophrenia: Impact on Customer Service Quality'.
More than two decades after the watershed economic reforms of 1991, customers find yawning gaps between what many companies promise to deliver as a matter of policy and what, in customers' perception, is actually delivered at the operating level.
A major part of the problem stems from the fact that while a company may be keen to maximise customer satisfaction, it would also want to maximise shareholder value at the same time. This obsessive pursuit kills people`s objectivity. The resulting conflict of self-interest generates wrong signals within the company, leading to organisational schizophrenia severely affecting employees' emotional engagement.
Supported by sizeable empirical research from 300 interviews with almost 200 respondents, including customer-contact employees, the book explores the reasons why, in a company-
- behaviour becomes unpredicpble,
- responsiveness becomes arbitrary,
- initiative becomes risky,
- operating practices drift away from policy and
- mission statements begin to turn into mere posters.
The book shows how organisational schizophrenia and the consequent problems can be avoided through disciplined and rigorous commitment to core values, standing up to wrongdoing, and taking a stand for the customer at all levels of management.
The book is full of examples and interesting small cases on the way business is being done in the Indian business context… an eye opener for all….It is full of insights that would be of great help to the CEOs and senior managers from HR and marketing in resolving the issues of behaviour expected by the customer.
A stimulating analysis...arguments are based on rich experience and an extensive analysis of the interviews with executives...an interesting read and the reader can connect with the cases from his or her own life experiences. The comic illustrations are like feather in the cap and add to the impact of the book making it a visual retreat.
The Book is highly engaging due to its simplistic pattern of presenting various realistic challenges encountered by Companies and discussing the solutions in delivering quality in Customer Service. The author being a practitioner of Business carefully crafted his well-researched thoughts to offer elucidation to ‘moments of truth’ experiences for the customers...The book is enriched with the views and experiences of 200 people in 12 different companies, frontline customer contact staff and people at different levels of hierarchy in different functions. The suggestions the author has made in this book are a result of his research. As a result, the book reflects a treasure of real-time issues concerned with quality of service experienced by consumers of different companies from both manufacturing and service sector...the content of this book would act as a catalyst for any Business practitioner, academicians, students and everyone who is interested to learn about the gaps between policy and practice of delivering quality in customer service that would impact the levels of satisfaction. The readers would be naturally compelled to hold their enthusiasm to read the Book, as it is a compendium of numerous and judiciously used comic illustrations.