BSBMGT406 Assessment Task 1

Customer Service Continuous Improvement Plan

Plan to encourage and support individuals and teams to participate in decision-making processes

First, the strategies that we will use for involving team members in decision-making are employee empowerment: the employee who work within an organization hold the knowledge and workings of an organisation and are central to its competitive advantage. Well-trained, coached and dedicated staff are critical to the development and implementation of continuous improvement strategies. Those staff members working directly with the customers know what is happening. When the ideas of all employees are valued and acted upon, the people you have hired are able to provide you with an insight into the way the customer feels and may also provide some creative solutions to the problems you face. Also, we will use collaborative decision making because the share ideas of worker for customer service can reduce unnecessary errors. I plan to encourage the employee and promote collaborative decision-making have the confidence to involve everyone in the decision-making process. So that I can:

• Communicate a vision to employees
• Inspire energy in others
• Set challenging goals
• See change as an opportunity, not a threat
• Think laterally

As the role of leader, I also:

1. Empower employees to engage in continuous improvement – this means allowing them to take more risks, gain more skills and knowledge, grow and develop, take responsibility for their work, be creative and make decisions.
2. Ensure quality is incorporated in the organisation’s vision, mission and values.
3. Ensure responsibilities and authorities are defined and communicated within the organisation.
4. Make the time and resources available for all employees to be involved in quality – this includes providing development for the entire workforce in the use of quality systems and tools.
5. Provide incentives that recognise the efforts involved in achieving quality outcomes, and reward achievement effectively.
6. Be the role model of continuous improvement.

Communication Plan

Plan for mentoring and coaching staff members

Coaching and mentoring are centred on unlocking a person ´s potential to maximise his or her own performance. A focus on improving performance and the development of skills is the key to an effective coaching relationship.

Plan to support efforts for sustainable and environmentally-friendly work practices

Many businesses are also recognising that to be sustainable, they need to take responsibility for not only their economic performance, but also their environmental and social performance. Not only will an environmental management issues help to improve your environmental performance, often improvements will also benefit your staff, especially as many environmental hazards can cause health and safety risks to people. The three key elements of an environmental policy are a commitment to:

• Prevent pollution
• Reduce Reuse Recycle
• Compliance with environmental regulations

System used to monitor, and review progressed

An operational plan includes the establishment of measures of success or operational performance indicators that enable the organisation to monitor and review operational progress as well as continuous improvement. Processes and systems must be implemented to ensure a strong method of review can be implemented within the organisation. This enables the organisation to compare the actual operational performance and progress towards meeting organisational goals and objectives to the predicted or estimated performance levels that have been included in the plans for the organisation.

The measurement and monitoring of operational progress facilitates further improvement within an organisation as it is able to leverage the areas of excellent or good performance and also apply solutions or improvements to those areas which may not be meeting expected performance levels. The measurement and monitoring is predicted on the organisation agreeing on the relevant measurement points in the key operational processes and ensuring that statistical data is collected and analysed over a period of time.

A plan to identifying how customers’ service can be continuously improved

In order to identify how customers’ service can be continuously improved the following must be followed:

1. Seek and analyze customer feedback through:
   1. Online customer service surveys
   2. Group interviews
2. Compare the results and identify gaps of the performance
3. Create performance management plan to document the things that must be improve and monitor
4. Conduct review again.

A recommendation outlining adjustment that need to be made in order to improve customer service

In order for the customers service to be continuously improved, the organization should take considerations into the following aspects:

• Enhance staff’s communication skills
• Enhance staff’s listening skills
• Provide staff with more certified customer service training
• Ensure that staff has complete knowledge of all products within the organization.
• Enforce on customer service value

Implement processes

In order for those who wish to implement processes can follow the following action plan:

Plan to record work performance

In order to record work performance, the organization should record the following:

• Previous performance
• Current performance
• Performance gap
• Results analysis

And also the organization must ensure that they store these performance in a safe storing facility whether it be online or offline.

Plan to discuss how to manage records

The records will be managed in 2 separated electronic databases. This is to ensure that there is a backup database just in case when one of them fail to work as required.

The records will be saved into both databases and it will not be kept in print at all. However, if there is a need to keep or use the print version of the record the staff can print them out for use.

Principles and Techniques

Benchmarking

The purpose of benchmarking, and these benchmarks particularly, is to support continuous quality improvement in technology enhanced learning. The approach reflects an enterprise perspective, integrating the key issue of pedagogy, with institutional dimensions such as planning, staff and student development and infrastructure provision. The benchmarks have been developed for use at the enterprise level, or by the organisational areas responsible for the provision of leadership in technology enhanced learning and their associated services.

Each benchmark area is discrete; for example, staff support for the use of technology enhanced learning can be used alone or in combination with others benchmarks. The benchmarks can be used for self-assessment purposes (in one or several areas), or as part of a collaborative, comparative exercise, one that may include other institutions.

Some of the benefits that have been found from prior use of the benchmarks include:

• Identification of strengths and weaknesses - for planning and priority setting;
• An improved understanding of strategic and operational requirements;
• A framework for quality assurance purposes;
• Recognition of areas of achievement;
• Generation of ideas and a reinvigoration of practice, for example, the development of strategies for improvement in areas of need;
• Collaboration is facilitated – develop better understanding across areas within the institution and with partners; and
• Communities of practice can develop which provide opportunities for staff professional development, project work, staff exchanges and secondments.

Best Practice

A best practice is a method or technique that has been generally accepted as superior to any alternatives because it produces results that are superior to those achieved by other means or because it has become a standard way of doing things. Best practices are used to maintain quality as an alternative to mandatory legislated standards and can be based on self-assessment or benchmarking. Best practice is a feature of accredited management standards such as ISO 9000 and ISO 14001.

The use of best practices, when incorporated within all areas of an organisation, including its stakeholder relationships, can lead to an organisation attaining world class performance. Often, an organisation may use one or more best practices and become renowned for their performance in these areas, but unless best practices are adopted consistently across all the functions of an organisation, as encouraged by business excellence models, it is likely that world class levels of performance will remain out of reach.

Change management

Businesses change – it’s the nature of a competitive marketplace. Regardless of the industry in which an organisation operates, at some point it will likely have to undergo some level of change in order to position itself as a market leader. Change management in business can be a complicated issue. Major adjustments to the way in which a business operates or provides its products and services must be carefully managed.

Change management is a term used to refer to the introduction of new processes in an organisation, or the management of people who are experiencing change. Change management is usually guided by a strong change management model, a framework people can use to understand the process and what is expected of them.

Central to the change management process in organisations is recognising when change is needed. Further steps include:

• deciding who needs to implement the changes (whole organization or one department)
• selecting a model or framework to guide the process
• deciding who is responsible for implementing the changes
• knowing your desired outcome.

Continuous improvement

Continuous improvement, or Kaizen, is a method for identifying opportunities for streamlining work and reducing waste. The practice was formalized by the popularity of Lean / Agile / Kaizen in manufacturing and business, and it is now being used by thousands of companies all over the world to identify savings opportunities. Many of these ideologies can be combined for excellent results

Continuous improvement can be viewed as a formal practice or an informal set of guidelines. Many companies have shifted focus to more formal approaches to project and process management such as Lean / Agile methodologies (Kanban, Kaizen, Scrum, XP).

By observing continuous improvement best practices, companies can figure out ways to continue business as usual while analyzing improvement opportunities along the way. For companies whose teams are unable to practice continuous improvement throughout their day-to-day work, the next best way to leverage the concept is to hold continuous improvement events, otherwise known as Rapid Improvement events or Value Stream Mapping. Continuous Improvement events can take anywhere between one to five days to complete, depending on the depth and breadth of the topic to be covered, and team members usually come away with “to-do” items that help the new processes take hold within the organization and may require a small amount of time to execute.

Quality systems

A quality management system (QMS) is a collection of business processes focused on consistently meeting customer requirements and enhancing their satisfaction. It is aligned with an organization's purpose and strategic direction (ISO9001:2015).

It is expressed as the organizational goals and aspirations, policies, processes, documented information and resources needed to implement and maintain it. Early quality management systems emphasized predictable outcomes of an industrial product production line, using simple statistics and random sampling. By the 20th century, labor inputs were typically the most costly inputs in most industrialized societies, so focus shifted to team cooperation and dynamics, especially the early signaling of problems via a continuous improvement cycle.

In the 21st century, QMS has tended to converge with sustainability and transparency initiatives, as both investor and customer satisfaction and perceived quality is increasingly tied to these factors. Of QMS regimes, the ISO 9000 family of standards is probably the most widely implemented worldwide – the ISO 19011 audit regime applies to both, and deals with quality and sustainability and their integration. Other QMS, e.g. Natural Step, focus on sustainability issues and assume that other quality problems will be reduced as result of the systematic thinking, transparency, documentation and diagnostic discipline. The term "QMS" was invented in 1991 by Ken Croucher, a British management consultant working on designing and implementing a generic model of a QMS within the IT industry.