UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ HO HOANG VIET LINH LOW PERFORMING CUSTOMER SERVICE STAFF IN LAZMALL CHANNEL OF LAZADA VIETNAM MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2020 1 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY International School of Business ------------------------------ HO HOANG VIET LINH LOW PERFORMING CUSTOMER SERVICE STAFF IN LAZMALL CHANNEL OF LAZADA VIETNAM MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION SUPERVISOR: Assoc.Prof.Dr. NGUYEN THI MAI TRANG Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2020 2 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .............................................................................................. 3 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................................................................ 4 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS: ........................................................................................ 5 LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................... 6 LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................ 6 1. Company background ............................................................................................. 8 2. Symptoms ............................................................................................................. 11 3. Problem identification ........................................................................................... 15 3.1. Potential problems ........................................................................................... 16 3.1.1. The first possible problem: Low performing Customer Service staff .. 17 3.1.2. The second possible problem: Complicated process ............................ 23 3.1.3. The third possible problem: Competitive market with increase in customer demand .................................................................................................. 25 3.1.4. Bad experience with product quality and delivery service ................... 28 3.2. Problem validation .......................................................................................... 32 3.2.1. Eliminating complicated process as main problem .................................... 32 3.2.2. Eliminating competitive market with increase in customer demand as main problem ................................................................................................................. 32 3.2.3. Eliminating Bad experience with Product quality and Delivery service as main problem ........................................................................................................ 33 3.2.4. Identify Low performing CS staff as the main problem ............................. 35 4. Justify the importance of Low performing CS staff ............................................. 35 5. Potential causes ..................................................................................................... 38 5.1. Potential cause 1: Stress at work ..................................................................... 38 5.1.1. Potential sub-cause 1: Lack of headcount due to wrong forecast ......... 38 5.1.2. Potential sub-cause 2: Too much distracting noise ............................... 40 5.2. Potential cause 2: Poor work engagement....................................................... 41 5.2.1. Potential sub-cause 1: Lack of bonding in team ................................... 42 5.2.2. Potential sub-cause 2: Unpleasant task ................................................. 44 1 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 5.2.3. Potential sub-cause 3: Limited praise and recognition ......................... 45 5.3. Potential cause 3: Robotic staff ....................................................................... 46 5.3.1. Potential sub-cause 1: Lack of soft skill agent ...................................... 46 5.3.2. Potential sub-cause 2: Limited learning and development opportunity 48 5.4. Cause validation .............................................................................................. 49 6. Alternative Solutions ............................................................................................ 51 6.1. Alternative solution 1: Design a set of team building activities ..................... 52 6.2. Alternative solution 2: Organize a buddy program ......................................... 54 6.3. Alternative solution 3: Change in appraisal scheme to motivate agents ......... 56 6.4. Solution justification ....................................................................................... 58 7. Change plan design ............................................................................................... 60 7.1. Objectives ........................................................................................................ 60 7.2. Expected outcomes .......................................................................................... 60 7.3. Plan implementation ........................................................................................ 61 8. Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 66 9. Supporting information ......................................................................................... 66 9.1. Methodology: .................................................................................................. 66 9.2. Interview guide .................................................................................................. 66 9.3. Transcript ........................................................................................................... 69 REFERENCES ............................................................................................................. 83 APPENDIX ................................................................................................................... 89 2 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT First of all, I would like to deliver my gratitude to ISB for giving me such valuable opportunity to apply all knowledge I have learned during my master of business administration course. I have been inspired a lot by enthusiastic and experienced professors and lecturers during my academic years. Specifically, I would like to sincerely thank my thesis supervisor - Assoc.Prof.Dr. Nguyen Thi Mai Trang for her careful and clear guidance. I cannot have completed this thesis without her advice and support. She is the one who is delivering me the very first knowledge about problem solving in organization with all her passion. In addition, I would like to express my appreciation to all people who have co-operated very well with me for my in-depth interviews and are very willing to spend their precious time to share valuable information for me to add in my thesis. Last but not least, I want to show my grateful attitude to my family members for the sympathy as they are always stand by me during my master thesis period. 3 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Customer satisfaction is a term that many companies are trying to achieve in this modern economy, as customer is the base for any enterprise to survive. However, in recent report of Lazada, Lazmall team has been achieved lower customer satisfaction than target, which goes against expectation of the management team in the company. Lazmall team has been founded in 2018 with the purpose to bring out the extraordinary experience for customers who buy authorized products on this platform. Therefore, in-depth interviews were conducted and data were collected to analysis the situation of Lazmall team. With the strong support of literature, the research comes up with some potential problems: Low performing customer service staff, complicated process, competitive market with increase in customer demand and bad experience with product and delivery service. After validation, the main problem as low performing customer service staff has been revealed. Further analyzing, the research shows some potential causes for the main problems, which are: Stress at work, no work engagement and robotic staff. After that, the main cause was identified as lack of work engagement, and some alternative solutions for the main cause were designed. The best solution to solve the main cause has been chosen basing on its feasibility and the adaption with company‘s situation. In a word, the thesis investigate the central problem in Lazmall team of Lazada, the main cause of that problem and the proposed solution, in order to improve the customer satisfaction score in Lazmall channel. 4 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS: CS: Customer service CSAT: Customer satisfaction DSAT: Dissatisfaction KPI: Key Performance Indicator SLA: Service Level Agreement Backlog: Ticket of customer that is not resolved within SLA NPS: Net Promoter Score SKU: Stock keeping unit SOP: Standard operation process 5 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 LIST OF TABLES Table 1 CSAT monthly of Lazada in 2019 Table 2 Ticket related to process of Lazmall in 2019 Table 3 E-commerce usage habit in Vietnam Table 4 Order beyond promised date divided by delivery method Table 5 Problem with Lazmall products received in 2019 Table 6 Call productivity of agents in campaign 11.11.2019 Table 7 Employee satisfaction toward company‘s physical working environment Table 8 Employee satisfaction of Lazada in 2019 Table 9 Quality scorecard result divided by criteria Table 10 Educational background of customer service employees in Lazada Table 11 Years of experience in same industry prior to Lazada Table 12 Cost for alternative solution 1 Table 13 Cost for alternative solution 2 Table 14 Cost for alternative solution 3 Table 15 Cost for selected solution Table 16 Action plan implementation LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1 Company structure of Lazada – Dec 2019 Figure 2 Lazmall customers by age – 2019 Figure 3 Lazmall customers by gender – 2019 Figure 4 Lazada customers‘ income by channel Figure 5 Lazada Customer service structure Figure 6 Lazmall CSAT and DSAT monthly Figure 7 CSAT Lazmall break down by agent‘s tenure Figure 8 Lazmall functional structure Figure 9 Lazmall DSAT root cause Figure 10 Potential problem diagram Figure 11 Lazada CS monthly quality score 2019 Figure 12 Quality score by tenure of Lazmall agent Figure 13 Lazada monthly backlog per headcount 2019 6 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Figure 14 Lazmall DSAT deep dive Figure 15 CS mistake contribution to DSAT in 2019 Figure 16 Process of handling transaction Figure 17 Traffic of users in Vietnamese Ecommerce Figure 18 Criteria cared by customer during shopping Figure 19 DSAT counts by contact reason Figure 20 Shipping and delivery issues contribution in Lazmall Figure 21 Net promotion score between Ecommerce site Figure 22 Potential causes Figure 23 Process of transaction handling in Lazada Figure 24 Updated cause effect map 7 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 1. Company background Founded in 2012, Lazada Vietnam is a part of Lazada group – a Southeast Asia‘s leading Ecommerce platform presenting in six countries. Lazada Group is majority owned by Alibaba Group Holding Limited. Lazada Vietnam is one of the pioneers in E-commerce industry, with its vision is to change Vietnamese consumer behavior, from traditional market to an online platform. On that platform, sellers can provide products from various categories like: Fashion and accessories, Health and Beauty, Groceries, Electronic products, Sport and toys, while shoppers can easily look for a product they want. In a word, Lazada‘s mission is to deliver an ―Effortless shopping experience‖ to buyers, by offering them a huge marketplace whereby they can approach online to millions of products from thousands of sellers. Focused on delivering an excellent customer experience, Lazada Vietnam offers multiple payment methods including cash-on-delivery, comprehensive customer care and hassle-free returns through its own firstand last-mile delivery arm supported by different logistics partners. Organizational structure: James Dong is the Chief Executive Officer of Lazada Vietnam and Lazada Thailand. James joined Lazada in June 2018 as the CEO of Lazada Thailand and was appointed CEO of Lazada Vietnam one year later, in addition to his existing role. Prior to joining Lazada, he was the Head of Alibaba Group Globalization Corporate Development and Business Assistant to Group Chief Executive Officer, Daniel Zhang. Under the CEO, there are six different departments, of which Customer Service belong to Customer care department. Figure 1: Company structure of Lazada – Dec 2019 (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) 8 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 LazMall Launched on the Lazada platform in August 2018, LazMall connects shoppers to over 1,500 leading authorized brand distributors. Lazmall is the flagship stores of Lazada, with the mission is to provide genuine and trusted along with reliable service and quality assurance. It is to say that Lazmall is a virtual mall, which allows Lazada to set a new higher standard in retail. Shoppers can check out with the assurance of 100% authenticity, 15-day hassle-free returns, and next-day delivery. All Lazmall products are distributed by the top famous brand like Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Laneige, Vichy, Za, Huggies, Pamper, Moony. For brands and sellers, LazMall offers an opportunity to create a customized experience for their customers. Lazada, hence, decided to build a special team to take care of consumers for this mall, called Lazmall customer service agent (Lazmall CS). The requirements for those agents to be recruited to this channel is very high, in order to deliver the wow experience for customers. It has been a big honor for those employees who were chosen to serve customers in this special channel. According to an internal survey of Lazada Customer Care, Lazmall buyers‘ background is illustrated in the following figure: First of all, the customers‘ age in 2019 is shown below: Figure 2: Lazmall customers by age – 2019 (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) 9 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 According to Figure 2, the participants who are from 25 to 35 years old accounted for the greatest portion with 41%, and the second majority are group between 36 to 45 years old. Meanwhile, the group of under 25 and over 45 account for the smallest part, which are at 16% and 13% respectively. Below is the gender structure of the customer database in 2019: Figure 3: Lazmall customers by gender – 2019 (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) For online shopping on Lazada, it is witnessed that women and men population account for almost equal part, which are 55% and 45% respectively. However, the proportion of female buyers is still higher than the percentage of male consumers in general. Next is the monthly income structure of purchasers on Lazmall compared to non-Lazmall channel in 2019: 10 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Figure 4: Lazada customers‟ income by channel (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) At a glance, figure 4 shows that Lazmall customers have the major population (35%) with income varies between 16-20 million VND, while non-Lazmall customers‘ monthly income mostly under 15 million VND (33% at 10-15 million dong and 31% under 10 million dong). It is obvious that Lazmall customers‘ earnings tend to be higher than non-Lazmall‘s. 2. Symptoms In recent months, from October 2019, it is observed that Lazmall channel have the lowest customer satisfaction score (CSAT) among other channels, and the score seems to decrease by time and even under target. For lots of enterprises, controlling customer dissatisfaction (DSAT) is extremely essential to maintain a stable and profitable growth. (1) In the condition of growing markets and under intense competitive pressures, many companies are spending their efforts on retaining a loyal customer base. Loyal consumers help on saving to service, are willing to spend more their time and money with the service & products, and open up a potential source for further business opportunities (1). The below graph the target set by Customer care department for the customer satisfaction score (CSAT). This target is set by regional Lazada team, all over six countries where Lazada is operated in, basing on the average CSAT score of history. 11 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Figure 5: Lazada Customer service structure (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) Total CSAT The formula to measure CSAT is: % CSAT = Total CSAT + DSAT The way Lazada calculate the score of CSAT is through customer response after they are being served by Customer service team. For every issue raised by customers, agent will create a ticket on system, after the ticket is resolved, system will automatically sent out a survey to get feedback from customers, whether they are satisfied with the solutions provided or not. Eight in-depth interviews with key persons of Lazada Customer service department, the Lazmall CS agent and Lazmall customers have been conducted to find out the possible problems. Mr. Thien - Customer Service manager also provided his idea that: „CSAT score of Lazmall team has been a crisis in the last quarter of 2019 that draws concern from not only Lazada Vietnam‟s CEO but also the regional management team. This reflects the fact that all the customers‟ attitude toward Lazmall team has been gone against our expectation of giving customers a better online shopping experience‟ (Pham Hoang Thien, Customer Service manager, 38 years old). Mr. Thien raised a big concern about the drop in CSAT score of Lazmall and emphasized that this problem brings a lot of attention from management team with the purpose of driving Lazmall team to the right track. The CSAT score record is reflected in the table below: 12 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Table 1: CSAT monthly of Lazada in 2019 Channel Unit: % Target Jun-19 Jul-19 Aug-19 Sep-19 Oct-19 Nov-19 Dec-19 CS non-Lazmall 88 89,60 89,28 90,98 90.54 90,94 89,94 90,83 CS Lazmall 90 91,55 91.65 91.13 90,85 88,89 88.69 88,76 (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) The CSAT score of CS non-Lazmall has been always above target, while the figure for CS Lazmall was unstable and became under target in the last quarter of 2019. Prior October 2019, the percentage of customer satisfied with Lazmall varied around 91% of survey respondents. Nevertheless, right after that, the score declined to 88.89% and stayed lower than 90% in the whole quarter. This is a threat to Lazada Vietnam, as Lazmall CS team was built with the purpose to provide customer exclusive experience at the first priority compared to others products channel. In three continuous months, the CSAT score for Lazmall CS was even lower than non-Lazmall agents, by up to 2% in the month of December. According to the sharing from Ms. Tu – Team leader of Lazmall: „The CSAT of Lazmall team had been always retained over target of 90% since the first day we started. However, recently, that number becomes the most serious concern for all of us. There are too many customers raise DSAT every day that it becomes more difficult for us to increase the overall score.‟ (Nguyen Thi Cam Tu, Lazmall Team leader, 29 years old) As mentioned by Ms. Tu, the CSAT score of Lazmall decreases in recent time and she claimed for the accretion of DSAT number raised by customers. The trend of CSAT/DSAT number among channels is shown in Figure 6: 13 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Figure 6: Lazmall CSAT and DSAT monthly (source: Internal Lazada report 2019) Have a glance at the DSAT number in green has the fluctuated trend in the first half of 2019 and the number always stayed smaller than 40 during this period. Meanwhile, in the second half, it observed the common trend of DSAT count, which was increase from 46 in July to 85 in December. Consequently, the %CSAT score also dropped from 91.65% to 88.76% in same period, which can prove for what Ms. Tu was sharing. The CSAT score broken down by tenure of Lazmall agents is shown in below figure: Target Figure 7: CSAT Lazmall break down by agent‟s tenure (source: Internal Lazada report 2019) 14 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Figure 7 shows that, the group of agents under three months of experience in Lazmall are always under target of CSAT, and this group is also the most fluctuated in CSAT score over the year. Functional structure of CS Lazmall: Figure 8: Lazmall functional structure (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) Within Lazmall customer service team, there are three main departments, which are Training, Quality assurance (QA) and Operation department. Training team is responsible for onboarding and qualifying new CS agent, while QA team‘s duty is to make sure agents perform well in quality metric. Operation team is in charge of productivity, CSAT score and headcount arrangement, to maintain the service level of Lazmall channel. 3. Problem identification With the DSAT data analysis collected from Quality team, ones can observe the factors leading to the decision of raising a DSAT from customer in below figure: 15 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Figure 9: Lazmall DSAT root-cause (source: Internal Lazada report 2019) According to Figure 9, four main internal factors that are considered to bring the major impact to customer dissatisfaction in Lazmall team are: logistics (30.3%), process (24.24%), CS staff mistake (20.45%) and product (19.7%) 3.1. Potential problems Through in-depth interview with key people in the company, the initial cause-effect map is found with some potential problems for low customer satisfaction of Lazmall CS team: 16 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Figure 10: Potential problem diagram (source: Author synthesis) Three symptoms were found including: the number of customers‘ complain increases, more tickets are reopen because customers disagree with resolution of Lazmall CS agent and the decrease of customer satisfaction score. Problems leading to the inflation of customer complaints are competitive market with increase in customer demand and the bad experience of buyers with Lazmall product quality and delivery service. Besides, the problems lead to more reopen tickets are complicated process of Lazmall and low performing Customer service staff. 3.1.1. The first possible problem: Low performing Customer Service staff In the interview with Mr. Khoa – Head of Customer care department, he stated that at the first stage, Lazmall team was built to represent for the whole Lazada and to increase the experience for Lazada customer. „This was our baby project for a long time and so far, Lazmall remains our first concern for any of our decision. We would like to build a strong and effective Lazmall team, in order to pull up the experience for Lazada buyers, by providing them a special care that they have never got before.‟ (Tran Dang Khoa, Head of customer care of Lazada, 35 years old) 17 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 It was proven by prior research that customer service has positive impact in increasing customer satisfaction, from there the purchase intentions is developed through word-of-mouth recommendations (2). In customer service, the employees play the main role to define the success in terms of bringing customer‘s experience. There exists an interdependence between customers and service employees and the activities or behaviors of one could mutually impact those of the other. (3) At the beginning of the Lazmall project, Mr. Khoa will directly interview in the final round to pick up every CS agent who had enough skills and experience. It was such a big honor for the selected agents to work in Lazmall. In addition to that, they were undergone an additional indepth soft-skill training to be able to handle tough complain. However, after more than a year of running project, the tittle Lazmall CS is no longer fancy in agents‘ mind as it used to be. „I was forced to join Lazmall CS team. I used to work in non-Lazmall team, and I was quite comfortable with that. However, since I was picked to Lazmall, my performance tends to decrease.‟ (Duong Thi Suong, Lazmall CS, 22 years old) According to the sharing from agents, recently, there was no interviewed conducted to select CS for Lazmall team and they were picked up from other channels. More importantly, some of them were forced to move to Lazmall rather than being willing to join. This is because of the fact that, there is a rule Lazada has set up for this team that Lazmall agents should be top performing CS. In case the agents no more perform well, he will be removed and replaced by other CS from non-Lazmall team. However, the overall KPI of the team continues to drop down with the above strategy. Mr. Thien said that: „The KPI of Lazmall team is a crisis problem in these months, while all the numbers of transaction quality, response speed are falling, and the number of backlogs increases more and more. This is unacceptable due to the fact that we have selected the best performed agent to work here‟. (Pham Hoang Thien, Customer Service manager of Lazada, 38 years old) In Lazada, each CS agent is evaluated by monthly KPI scores, including: - Response speed: counted by the percentage of transaction in which CS can first response customer within 30 seconds. - Transaction quality, measured by a scorecard monitored by quality assurance specialists - Backlog (ticket which is not resolved within 48hours) 18 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 It is observed that from second half of 2019, those KPI scores of those criteria have been fluctuated and even gone below target: Figure 11: Lazada CS monthly quality score 2019 (source: Internal Lazada report 2019) The quality score break down by different group of is illustrated in below figure: Figure 12: Quality score by tenure of Lazmall agent (source: Internal Lazada report 2019) It is observed that tenured agents have stable quality score in all calls, while new joins‘ quality usually fluctuates. The quality is mostly decided by how well each agent provides appropriate solution for customers, basing on the process of Lazada. All newbies of Lazmall were recruited from non-Lazmall channel and the selected candidates must have excellent 19 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 performance previously. However, when coming to Lazmall, their quality performance seems down significantly. Figure 13: Lazada monthly backlog per headcount (source: Internal Lazada report 2019) Figure 11 and 13 showed that, quality scores of agents in Lazmall team are lower than nonLazmall one over most the months in 2019, while the backlog per agent is higher. This indicates that, both quality and productivity of Lazmall team are not as good as target of Lazada. More importantly, from the observation of Quality team, the DSAT made by CS mistake has the increasing trend in Lazmall department throughout the last quarter of 2019, while the figure for non-Lazmall agent remain unchanged: Figure 14: Lazmall DSAT deep dive (source: Internal Lazada report 2019) 20 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 In previous part, from the income data, ones can see that Lazmall customers are usually of premium level and they were promised by Lazada to be served in a special channel, at premium class. However, according to a sharing from– Lazmall customers, there is no much difference between the Lazmall and non-Lazmall CS agent in terms of handling customer complain. „Lazada advertises a lot of benefit for customers buying Lazmall products, however, when I have problem with the item received, the way that a Lazmall CS handle my issue is similar to the time I bought a normal product and contacted to non-Lazmall agents. I did not see any special priority regarding the post-purchase support here‟ (Ms. Hoang Minh Anh, customer of Lazmall, 30 years old) From what Ms. Minh Anh said, there is no different in the way a Lazmall and non-Lazmall agent handle the call from customers. Meanwhile, in the term and condition of Lazada, customers were promised to enjoy a specific service ever, which is a trade-off for them to buy Lazmall – more expensive products on Lazada. This is the most disappointing part because Lazada is not delivering what buyers desire. CS Lazmall staff is the only ones directly dealing with customers and in other word, they are the representative for Lazmall brand image in clients‘ eye. Customer services staff plays a vital role in building customer‘ interest for a particular service provider (4). One of the critical factors that lead to the customer satisfaction when using a service provider is employee behavior, comprises of friendliness, responsiveness and the promptness of the employee. The data Lazmall DSAT root-cause showed that customer service staff mistakes accounted for 20.45 percent of total factors that lead to dissatisfaction among consumers. That number tended to increase month over month The CS mistakes include: lack of communication skill, courtesy, knowledge and transaction handling skill. Bellow figure shows the CS mistake contribution in total DSAT in 2019, data annalyzed by Quality team. 21 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Figure 15: CS mistake contribution to DSAT in 2019 (source: Internal Lazada report 2019) As cited by Wu (5), Arthur and Bennett emphasized that customer service agents who own good communication skill including listening well to others and expressing their ideas clearly could result in a better understanding of customers‘ demands and help to build a trustworthy relationship with them. Communication mistake is counted when a CS agent does not show empathy to customers, ignore customers‘ questions or concern and answer them in a robotic way. According to Wieseke et al. as cited by Bahadur et al. (6), empathy is illustrated as ―a person‘s ability to sense another‘s thoughts, feelings, and experiences, to share other‘s emotional experience, and to react to the observed experiences of another person‖. It has an important role in customer service that in Lazada, especially Lazmall, empathizing becomes a mandatory requirement for any CS agent. This is because of the fact that empathy is a powerful tool for adequate human intercommunication and in the service industry and a key factor for successful interactions between clients and frontline employees (7). Customers can feel that they are understood, from there turning into positive emotions and attitude toward the service brand (6). Courtesy mistake is when the agents show bad attitude with customers, and for this fault, those will be terminated right away. Listeners could be able to sense the inadequate manner of CS employees through their tone of voice, words use and the rhythm of response. For example, the staff who intensely argue with customers, intentionally leave a long dead air to avoid answering queries, or jumping into clients‘ mouth while they are talking. According to Bienstock et al. as cited by Beatson et al. (8), the serving behaviors and attitudes of frontline employees are essential for the positive reaction of services by clients. 22 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Lack of knowledge and transaction handling skill means the agents does not meet target quality to handle a standard call or chat received from buyers. With this weakness, the CS staff can provide wrong information and wrong resolution for customers or they escalate to inappropriate departments, which leads to longer waiting time. Those mistakes are frequently checked by quality specialists and it was recorded that mistake by lack of knowledge accounted for 27.85% and 15.07% of agents are short of transaction handling skill. As cited by Wu et al., Boshoff and Allen stated that (5) employees who lack the required workplace competencies may fail to meet customers' needs or provide satisfactory service quality. This is because when an employee deliver the agreed service dependably and accurately, the consumers more likely to believe that the enterprises possess high-quality service, and thereby perceive better satisfaction to the service (5). 3.1.2. The second possible problem: Complicated process First to mention is the call- transfer process for Lazmall. When customers contact to CS agents to raise specific issues, all their need is to have a quick answer straight to the point. However, due to the routing system of Lazada, it is still indefinite that a Lazmall customer can directly connect to a Lazmall CS agent. There is a process for those cases: Figure 16: Process of handling transaction (source: Internal training process) Ones can see that for Lazmall customers, the process to handle is more complicated due to the issue of system. In case Lazmall customers first contact to a non-Lazmall agent, their problems are not solved right after they explain, but they have to wait another time to be 23 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 redirected to correct line. For some customers, it is annoying and Mr. Nguyen Duc Hung shared that: „I do not understand why sometime I call Lazada, the staff asks for my issues and stated that they understood my issue, but they asked me to wait for them to transfer to Lazmall customer service staff. It really takes my time and sometime, I decided to hang up the phone because of that. I do not care who will solve my problem, I just want to have the solution in time.‟ (Mr. Nguyen Duc Hung, customer of Lazmall, 28 years old) The thing that makes customers disappointed is they have to wait longer time to actually meet Lazmall CS, and more frustratingly is they have to pay for those minutes of waiting via phone channel. When purchasers are complaining, they do not really care about who is solving their problem, but rather how long their problem will be solved, according to the sharing of Mr. Nguyen Duc Hung. Compared this to non-Lazmall channels, the buyers are always supported right away whenever they can reach to a CS, because the transfer process does not apply for this channel. The evolving of customers´ satisfaction is counted a lot on the effectiveness of an appropriate method, the speed of processing and their result, along with timely and specialized communication with customer (9). In other word, when customers contact to CS agents to raise specific issues, all their need is to have a quick answer straight to the point. However, as mentioned earlier, the process of transaction handling for a Lazmall customer is more complicated than non-Lazmall ones, which causes longer waiting time. According to figure 15, 24.24% of DSAT from Lazmall team in 2019 were caused by process. The top complains for process are: Long waiting time of Return & refund, order tracking and transaction handling process. The table below refers to the contribution of above processes that buyers often complain: Table 2. Ticket related to process of Lazmall in 2019 Process Number of ticket Percentage Return & Refund 11534 43.19% Order tracking 9072 33.97% Transaction handling 6098 22.84% (source: Internal Lazada report 2019) About the refund & return process, Lazmall products have the policy to return to Lazada, while non-Lazmall products can return directly to Sellers. Because of the fact that Lazada 24 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 does not sell those products, so the time for quality checking (QC) is often longer than when customers contact straight away to merchants. The total time that Lazmall consumers have to wait until their product is refunded since requesting an online return form is 20 days, while the number remain only 15 days for non-Lazmall products. The bad experience of waiting not only influences customers‘ perceptions of service quality but also cause impatience, which is of the top root cause for dissatisfaction (5). For an order tracking, it depends quite much on third party logistic (3PL), so for any late order, customers have to wait 2 more days before Lazmall CS can escalate to transport department. As cited by Wu et al. (5), Davis and Vollmann also proved that in service experiences, waiting time became more crucial than quality of service in concern with customer satisfaction. Moreover, the experience of customers will become worse if they have to continue waiting while Lazada cannot meet delivery promised date. 3.1.3. The third possible problem: Competitive market with increase in customer demand At the role as a Head of Customer care department, Mr. Khoa has an overview about the Ecommerce industry in Vietnam that: „We well aware that Lazada always have to develop and improve day by day to not be left behind by our friends Shopee, Tiki and Sendo. Consumers become wiser to compare between sellers in order to choose the best service. They have a community online and even offline to share shopping experience on Ecommerce. Hence, if we do not stay focus for a second, a small mistake can be made and gone viral, eventually customers will go to other shopping platform.‟ (Tran Dang Khoa, Head of customer care Lazada, 35 years old) From what Mr. Khoa mentioned, in the modern marketplace where customers have more choices of shopping, it is very serious if customers are not happy with the service, as they can easily find a similar vendor elsewhere. In addition, acknowledging that Shopee Mall, Tiki Trading and SenMall were also built and promoted to be special project in respective platform, Lazmall is not the unique and competitive brand anymore. Toward the actual feedback from customers, CS Lazmall agents answered the interview that: „When customers complain to us, they always compare that why Shopee and Tiki agents provide solution for them in this way but Lazada agents answer in other way. They also compare the policy, the products and the price with other platforms. They should be 25 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 understood that different online platform has different policy and we just follow our policy.‟ (Duong Thi Suong, Lazmall CS agent, 22 years old). According to Ms. Suong, customers often bear in their mind a comparison with their shopping experience in other Ecommerce sites or with their friend‘s experience on those platforms. With a similar situation, for example mutual check policy, customers always ask that why Tiki allow them to pre-check the package before process payment, but Lazada do not. Information is shared among buyers very fast that almost every policy of all Ecommerce sites are perceived very quickly and thoroughly. Below data is the trend of traffic use in top 4 top Ecommerce guys in Vietnamese market: Figure 17: Traffic of users in Vietnamese Ecommerce (source: Iprice 2019) Within 1 year, from quarter 3 of 2018 to quarter 4 of 2019, Lazada has dropped its position in terms of traffic uses, from 2nd position to 4th position. This also means, customers are turning their habit to visit other sites, with number one belong to Shopee. This is a disadvantage for Lazmall team because with this trend, customers can have their own proof to complain more while making a comparison with service in ShopeeMall, Tiki Trading and SenMall. In one hand, the ecommerce market in Vietnam is considered to be a fierce competition between many big guys. The biggest competitors of e-commerce startups have been not only Shopee, Tiki or Sendo but also a social network (social commerce) (10). With such many choices of user, customers are now able to compare the service between different platform. 26 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Table 3: E-commerce usage habit in Vietnam 2018 2019 E-commerce % using the % using of % using the % using of site vendor vendor most vendor vendor most Shopee 75% 35% 75% 44% Lazada 70% 20% 62% 11% Tiki 58% 17% 59% 18% Sendo 44% 5% 46% 7% (Source: Asia Plus Inc. (Tokyo, Japan), Vietnam EC Market Survey) Table 3 showed that in the year 2018 and 2019, Shopee has been the leading ecommerce platform used by online shoppers (75% of online consumers use Shopee). Meanwhile, Lazada‘s popularity has been declined 8% of users and the percentage of loyalty customers decreased from 20% in 2018 to 11% in 2019. Other competitors like Tiki also on the good trend of increasing its coverage among e-commerce buyers, which make the market more competitive. On the other hand, Lazmall products are at more expensive price so the consumers for this channel are observed to be at higher level-income. People whose function in higher status occupations have characteristic personalities, motives and values that set them apart from those in less prestigious positions (11). Tronvoll reported from previous research that there is a significant relationship between occupation and complaint behavior and people who have managerial and professional occupational status are complainers (12). Therefore, for Lazmall service, the expectation from customer is much higher, which means more effort is needed to win customers satisfaction here. Consumer satisfaction takes place if products and services meet their threshold of expectation (13). With the globalization and liberalization of services, there is a critical requirement for ecommerce industry to build and retain consumer relationships. The reason behind is because buyers can turn their back on a service when they perceive a better offer elsewhere which meets their requirements and expectation among other companies providing similar products or services (14). Moreover, for online buyers, the virtually prompt access to the offers of other service and can make them more easily change to other competitors (15). That is when a higher level of commitment to the consumers must be provided by the e-business with the purpose to maintain customer satisfaction and increase loyalty. 27 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 3.1.4. Bad experience with product quality and delivery service According to a research by Younet Media, Product quality and Delivery service are top two concern of customers after buying products. Customer satisfaction and purchasing decision often have positively associated with each other. Figure 18: Criteria cared by customer during shopping (source: Younet 2019) Lazmall products have to type: the first one is Retail item – means the products sold by Lazada, and the second type is Marketplace item – sold by Merchant (Seller). For Retail items, Ms. Quyen – Lazmall agent shared that „In Lazmall, more than 50% of the contact reason for complain is about “Problem with items received” and “where is my order”. The Lazmall products fulfilled by Lazada often miss freebies and this issue once happens, it will always happen systematically‟ (Do Mai Quyen, Lazmall CS agent, 21 years old) Lazada itself is just an online platform where buyers and connect with sellers, and the products are delivered by a third party partner. Therefore, like Ms. Quyen stated, most issues of customers are related to product quality and delivery service- which is difficult for Lazada themselves to control. According to Ms. Tu, the most common issue with product is missing freebies. This is because of the systematic issues from technical team when SKU of products is not attached with SKU of free gifts appropriately. That will leads to the consequence that the warehouse staff do not receive the information of free gifts SKU and therefore all orders for that products have same issue of missing items. 28 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 For Marketplace products, since Lazada is a platform that allow sellers to post their all products for sell, there is not any pre-check process from Lazada‘s side to make sure those products pass the quality check. In addition to that, from early 2019, Lazada has stop allowing customer to mutual check products with shippers. This increases the bad experience with products quality, hence, reduce customers‘ trust and satisfaction. Ms. Thuc Hien – a Lazmall customers complained that: „When I purchased on Lazmall, the item still got problems like wrong delivered, broken or missing freebies. This really got me lose hope about Lazmall products in general, because I know that I had to pay more, but the quality still not too outstanding and worthy.‟ (Nguyen Thuc Hien, Lazmall customer, 27 years old). After interviewing with buyers of Lazmall, they shared that actual quality of Lazmall products still make them dissatisfied. They do compare and know that Lazmall products have higher price than non-Lazmall ones, because customers can enjoy a genuine quality. However, they still have to return because of ones of the problem: wrong items, not as advertise, defective products, etc. The next thing they have to do afterward is returning the item, which takes about 15-20 working days of process and definitely is not within customers‘ expectation. When getting the ideas from customers, Ms. Hoang Minh Anh said that: „I chose Lazmall product because Lazada guarantee genuine quality and an express delivery. Last time, I bought a Lazmall purse for my friend‟s birthday, but they did not deliver on time and it ruined my plan. Such a terrible experience‟. (Hoang Minh Anh, Lazmall customer, 25 years old) For delivery, Lazada has not owned any logistic department. All delivery service is handled by third party logistic, which is still depending a lot on the contract between the partner. The express delivery of Lazada is within 24 hours, while Shopee offers 4 hours fast deliver, Tiki promises an express delivery within 2 hours, and Sendo within 3 hours. Tiki even owns a team of logistic, which can support them to prioritize orders themselves. The Express delivery service (same day delivery) is not always as Lazada commit with customer, and even when 3PLs do not fulfill their promise, CS agents have no right to escalate or push them to delivery faster. Agent Suong shared that: „We really understand with customer that when they choose the Express service means they are willing to pay more for delivery with the demand of getting the goods for urgent 29 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 purpose, otherwise, customer should have chosen Standard or Economy method. Most customer complain with us about the “Same day delivery”, because it‟s already beyond they date that logistic partner commits. It‟s not our fault and the irrational thing is we cannot push 3PL‟ (Duong Thi Suong, Lazmall CS agent, 22 years old) Figure 19: DSAT counts by contact reason (source: Internal Lazada report 2019) Shipping and delivery related are the most frequent concern from customers, causing 33.56% of total DSAT. According to Moth as cited by Cao et al. (16) The research of UPS and ComScore showed that shipping and delivery are proven to be dominant factor affects to shopper satisfaction in e-business. It was also found that the top concern of online consumers are related to shipping, including: free or discounted shipping fee, on-time delivery, flexibility of shipping, and return service (16). Meanwhile, for Lazmall, the top complains about delivery are: Figure 20: Shipping and delivery issues contribution in Lazmall (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) 30 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 According to figure 20, late delivered is the most considerable issue from Lazmall buyers. As cited by Cao et al. (16), Reibstein stated that timely delivery is equally significant to predicting the level of buyer‘s satisfaction in comparison with price, which is often pointed out by various e-commerce researchers. Especially when the ―Same-day deliver‖ is only applied for Lazmall products, 65% of complains are about this shipping method (see in table 4). Same-day delivery is usually very costly that most customers are not willing to pay the extra price, though it provides instant fulfillment (16). It means when customer they decide to use, apparently expect the minimum of late delivery. However, according to table 4 below, the express delivery causes the top complain regarding late orders. Like Yun et al. stated (as cited by Raquel et al.), when buyers‘ expectations and perceptions of a service and its quality fail to match, complain and dissatisfaction happens (17). Table 4: Order beyond promised date divided by delivery method Shipping method % complain Express delivery 65% Standard delivery 25% Economy delivery 10% (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) From Figure 19, the contact reason related to ―Problem with product received‖ account for the second rank, which is 22.15% of total DSAT tickets. As mentioned earlier, Lazmall products is guaranteed by Lazada about the authenticity and easy return policy. In addition to that, because Lazmall sellers are charged 3-5% higher commission fees compared to non-Lazmall sellers, leading to the fact that Lazmall products have respectively higher price than nonLazmall one. With the guarantee from Lazada and such more expensive price, customer expectation about products therefore has been set at greater level. According to Grönroos as cited by Xu et al. (18) there is not a clear criteria to evaluate product quality because it is more about the perception of customer. In details, it is defined as the difference between the product expectation and the product perception (in case the product perception is not as high as the product expectation, product quality perception by the customer is poor). In general, from in-depth interview and literature, four potential problems are identified. Low performing customer service staff and complicated process are the causes for long average handling time of a transaction, hence customers have to wait longer time or even have to recontact many times to get the issues solved. The rest potential problems are competitive 31 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 market with increase in customer demand and bad experience with product quality & delivery service. For these points, the consequence is consumers can easily compare and increasingly demand a better service, therefore, more bad complains are delivered. All of these result in low customer satisfaction score for Lazmall department. In the next part, the author will deeply validate the potential problems using literature to eventually identify the main problem that give the most impacts on customer satisfaction in Lazmall. 3.2. Problem validation Four possible problems identified from previous part includes: low performing customer service staff, complicated process, competitive market with increase in customer demand and bad experience with products and delivery service. To clarify the major problem among the above, validating each problem is necessary. 3.2.1. Eliminating complicated process as main problem According to sharing from Mr. Khoa, the process of Lazada is not only decided by customer care department, but also monitored by other internal and external department. The reason behind is Lazada and especially Lazmall does not earn profit from buyers only, but from sellers also. Lazmall sellers are charged 0.5% to 12% additional commission fee compared to non-Lazmall seller, and advertising or marketing activities are more focused on this type of seller (19). Therefore, the long and complicated process for refund & return is difficult to be changed, because it depends on Seller also. Mr. Khoa emphasized that, any change or update from the process needs to have agreement from all parties, Customer care department cannot make the decision themselves. Furthermore, there is just some minor adjusts related to the process since the time Lazmall started operating until present, and as data shown in table 1, the CSAT score of Lazmall used to be very high (above target of 90%) in the first half of the year. This means the process is not the main impact on the decline of customer satisfaction. 3.2.2. Eliminating competitive market with increase in customer demand as main problem For many company, complain is a gift because if managing and utilizing its well, business can achieve stability and profitable growth. (1) 32 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Meanwhile, when customers decided to exit, they will stop purchasing from this company and switch their buying habit to the competitor. In this case, those customer rarely give complains(17). According to that, if buyers keep comparing with Lazada‘s competitors and raising DSAT to Lazmall, means they hardly turning their back on Lazada for other site like Tiki, Shopee, Sendo,etc. From that, competitive market with increase in customer demand is not the main problem, because it does not impact most to the repurchase intention of customers and therefore, not impact to the revenue of company as a whole. There are 2 typical ways of reaction when consumers are dissatisfied with a product or service: to voice and to exit, which present the complainers and non-complainers (20). When customers choose to voice, means they still give the company chance to improve and complainers are re-purchaser (17). When complainers receive courteous and empathetic responses to their complaints, they are more likely to be satisfied. Empirical studies have shown that attentiveness exerts significant positive effects on complainer satisfaction and repurchase intentions (20). 3.2.3. Eliminating Bad experience with Product quality and Delivery service as main problem When purchasing goods from online platform, the product itself represents what customers want to fulfill their desires, while services represent how the desires are fulfilled. Both are significant in terms of determining customer satisfaction, however, the research of Sun indicates that product quality only leaves an indirect impact on how customer feel to the e-business (20). In fact, Lazmall products has up to 15 days easy return with Lazada for any problem with item received. Therefore, if buyers face any issues related to the goods, they will get the money back if they contact to Lazada within 15 days. Consumers who experienced a failure, complained, and then received a satisfactory recovery, were more willing to repurchase 1.130 times more than those who did not experience a service problem (4). That is the reason why bad experience with product cannot be the main problem for the dissatisfaction of Lazmall consummers. Moreover, the related issues with items is shown in bellow table: 33 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Table 5: Problem with Lazmall products received in 2019 Problem with product received Percentage Missing freebie 30.30% Missing accessory 27.27% Wrong item / Not as advertised 21.21% Change of mind 6.06% Damaged 6.06% Counterfeit 3.03% Defective product 3.03% Expired product 3.03% (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) As see in table 5, missing freebie and missing accessory are top two reason for products issue. For those two reasons, Mr. Khoa acknowledged that it was difficult to resolved because the root cause behind is the unexpected bug from technology team, which prevent warehouse to receive information about the freebies and accessory SKUs. For delivery service, Ms. Tu shared that: „Right now, all our shipment providers are our partners, not our subsidiaries (even Lazada express – Lex). We have a separate contract between Lazada and the third party logistic, however, we acknowledge that they do serve other business, like Shopee, Tiki, etc. Because of that, in the high season of sales with high volumes of orders in all e-commerce sites, problem with delivery happens the most often.‟ (Ms. Nguyen Thi Cam Tu, Lazmall Team leader, 29 years old) From what Ms. Tu stated, the issue with delivery service is a seasonal issues, when the logistic partner are overwhelmed with orders from several vendors. The sales season is usually in the last 2 months of the year (11.11 and 12.12), when the number of orders can be triple compared to normal days. Furthermore, making any improvement on the service of delivery is not within customer care department‘s capacity, as it affects to the process and benefit other department also. Hence, both product quality and delivery service are not chosen to be the major problem to solve in current situation. 34 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 3.2.4. Identify Low performing CS staff as the main problem Customer Services plays a vital role in forming customer satisfaction for any service provider because one of the main factors affecting the feeling of customer towards a service is the way employee behave, including friendliness, responsiveness and the promptness during the transaction handling process (6). Moreover, studies of Bahadur have emphasized the role of first-line staff in guiding customers‘ service assessments, specifically satisfaction and loyalty due to the employee–customer direct contact in service process (6). Ms. Tu also admitted that, the performance of CS Lazmall agents has been fluctuated and gone down lower than ever before within the last 3 months. The CS performance are defined by: Response speed, Transaction quality, Backlog (ticket which is not resolved within 48hours). Mr. Thien infirmed that for CS Lazmall agents, he has been directly interviewing and picking one by one to Lazmall team, in order to make sure their quality meets his expectation at first. This is the reason why during the operation period of Lazmall, he hardly involved in the performance of staff. In fact, there are many variables impacting the performance of staff, including: workplace environment, job related factors and employees themselves related factors (21). The management team of Lazmall only considers the employees related factors to be the foundation of all agents‘ performance so far, leading to the consequence that this problem has not been resolved properly. Hence, the author would like to choose the Low performing staff as main problem to be further analyzed. 4. Justify the importance of Low performing CS staff Customer service includes the staff working in a set of procedure in order to creates a satisfying experience for customers (22). For any company, this department is a key to maintain, nurture and develop the resource of customers. According to Domegan and Donaldson as cited by McGuinn (22), the advantage of customer service is to enhance the customer satisfaction and profitability, resulting in improving business image. In the research of Ekmekci (23), with the company's frontline employees through multiple transactions, customer service represents the holistic experience with the business. In reality, for any service environment, frontline staff is the one representing the company in order to directly communicate with customers. From this specific perspective, in the opinion of Cadwallader et al., cited by Ekmekci (23), it is critical to develop better connection between 35 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 clients and staff, and at the same time should look for the methods to motivate those employees if company wants to create a sustainable customer service model. Employee performance reflects the efficiency of the support to customer. Performance is acknowledged as work performance or in other word, is certain achievement gained by someone. It is defined as the work quality and quantity carried out by an employee in accordance with the responsibilities assigned by his function (24). Furthermore, according to Yang et al cited by Utin (24), performance is always dependent on various factors, including: employee work satisfaction, the level of recognition given, and influenced by personal skills, abilities, and traits. In order to consolidate the problem, the paper will propose the importance of low performing Customer service staff. Firstly, basing on the interview and data from Lazada Vietnam, the percentage of customer dissatisfied with Lazmall CS agents increased over the last year. Therefore, they are losing their trust on what Lazada promised to Lazmall customers and potentially turning their back on this service. This is because of the fact that customer choice is significantly influenced by the customer satisfaction with the service provider (6). The consequence is proven by data in table 3, that Shopee and Tiki witnessed the increase in loyal user portion, while the figure of Lazada has decreased from 20% in 2018 to 11% in 2019. Secondly, one of the consequences can be reflected by the low of Net Promoter Score (NPS). This is a measurement for customer experience, and it was proven that customer satisfaction and customer loyalty had a strong relationship with each other (25). The way to calculate NPS is: Subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. With this calculation, the NPS index ranges between -100 and 100. It not only evaluates the customer satisfaction but it can also be used as a management system which can impact the organization performance (26). In Lazada, the NPS survey is sent out to every customer who has purchased at least one time. The detail of that survey is illustrated in the Appendix. There is a specific survey for Lazmall buyers, in which customers are also asked about their attitude toward other competitors, like ShoppeMall, Senmall, Adayroi and Tiki Trading. The summary of NPS is estimated below: 36 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Figure 21: Net promotion score between Ecommerce site (source: Internal Lazada report 2019) According to figure 21, Tiki trading and Senmall have the most loyal customer, while Lazmall and Adayroi have the minus NPS score (for Lazmall is -3% and for Adayroi is -6%). In the end of December 2019, Adayroi decided to close their business, so the market remain 4 big guys, in which Lazada has the lowest NPS. To increase the net promotion score, it is essential to improve the customer service quality, especially the performance of the frontline employees. The reason behind is, if customers are treated well, they will gradually become a followers and even promoters to the company (26). The decreases of NPS means a potential high risk to the business, as it is a symptom of losing customers over other competitor. According to Reichheld as cited by Faltejsková et al. (26) maintaining customer loyalty is a critical method to grow up business performance. The impact on its operation can be fatal in case a corporation cannot prevent the loss of customers. A research showed that the 5% increase in number of customer can influent up to 30% to 95% on the net present value (NPV) and the business profit also receives the similar impact. Lastly, the three major significant groups of stakeholders in a company are customers, staff and leaders, and all of them do not stand against one another but are able to build a coefficient cooperation effect which leads to success of the whole firm (26). The employees are the base to the develop of customer resource, and business leaders cannot grow the company without the employees who are able to get the job done(26). Improving staff performance is critical to the overall success of the company. Therefore, improve the performance of CS staff is 37 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 extremely important in bringing customer satisfaction, from that Lazmall in specific can maintain and attract more loyal customers and the company can maintain a sufficient business structure. 5. Potential causes From the above analysis, the main problem of has been found as low performing customer service staff. More interviews were conducted to explore the possible causes of low performing customer service staff, which support to define three potential causes: stress at work, no work engagement and robotic staff. Figure 22: Potential causes (source: Author synthesis) 5.1. Potential cause 1: Stress at work Stress is one factor that can negatively affect to employee‘s performance (27). The indicators that lead to stress in Lazmall team includes: Lack of headcount due to wrong forecast and too much distracting noise. 5.1.1. Potential sub-cause 1: Lack of headcount due to wrong forecast Firstly, due to the wrong forecast, the current agents cannot handle higher-than-planned volume of calls. Ms. Tu mentioned in the interview: `In recent months, every day we received exceed numbers of actual calls coming in comparing to forecast. For example, the forecast of customer volume in December is 1000 calls/day, however actually we have to take 1500 calls. In case we drop the call, service level target will be impacted`(Nguyen Thi Cam Tu, Lazmall Team leader, 29 years old) 38 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Following what Ms. Tu shared, the actual volume of contacts is always higher than the forecast from Work force management team, therefore her team capacity can not offer fully all the customers` complains. However, to maintain the requirement of Service level (SL), her team always have to spend more effort in handling extra calls coming. The Service level is a term reflexes a business`s responsiveness to client contacts in a certain time(28). For Lazmall, the target is 95% telephone calls/chat must be answered within 30 seconds, which is the mandatory KPI for operation team to achieve. Due to this, the Lazmall agents always have to handle call in hurry, which impact to call quality. As cited by Johari (29), Lee indicated that there exists a decline in performance of employee when increasing in time deadline pressure. For a normal agent, the average handling time is 4.7 minutes, while for Lazmall, as Ms. Tu shared, CS staff has to complete call in 3.2 minutes only. This is increased significantly in the online shopping campaign of Lazada (11.11 and 12.12). Below table is the number of calls agents have to take per day: Table 6: Call productivity of agents in campaign 11.11.2019 Average handling time Channel Call per day (minutes) Work hour/day Lazmall agent 93 5.2 8 Non- Lazmall agent 61 7.7 10 (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) According to Table 6, the average number of call per day of a Lazmall agent is almost 1.5 times higher than a Non-Lazmall one, and respectively, the Average handling time of Lazmall agent is much lower. Agent Duong Thi Suong shared that: „We have to end up the call in hurry, and sometimes we avoid to ask customers whether they still have and further issues, which is mandatory in the quality scorecard. Hence, QA often minus our quality score when those call are audited. Our team leader always urges us to idle all the time and we cannot let any customer waiting on queue for so long‟ (Duong Thi Suong, Lazmall CS agent, 22 years old). Also according to Ms. Suong, she and her colleague often have to stay extra 2 -3 hours/day to solve the backlog cases, because during the working day, they rarely have time to do so. The working process of CS is: 39 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Figure 23: Process of transaction handling in Lazada (Inter Lazada report 2019) Figure 23 showed that agent‘s task in not just answering call only, but also processing the ticket after call, which takes about 3.2 minutes on average (27). With the data in table 6, it‘s obviously that the workload of Lazmall agents is higher than average in campaign time. Over workload specifies the great amount of job assignment, which employee responsible at work, and might cause mental distress for workers (29). The literature suggests that pressure is considered as a source of reducing job performance, and as one climb up their career path, the ability of handling work pressure becomes higher (29). At agents level – the capacity of adapting to pressure is low, therefore, stress will negatively affect to their performance. Work-force management team is in charged of volume and headcounts forecast. Basing on the request of forecast, recruitment team will process hiring agents and bring them to training in 1 months. After training, employees will go to production and reach to a tenure agents after 3 months. The whole process of producing in a tenure employee takes almost 5 months, therefore, if the forecast is incorrect at the start, service level will not meet at the drop of a hat, which makes all other KPI meaningless. 5.1.2. Potential sub-cause 2: Too much distracting noise Another factor causing agent‘s pressure is the noise in operation floor. In the interview with Lazmall CS to find out the difficulties during their daily work, Ms. Quyen shared that: `What makes me distracted the most is the noise we are hearing every day. Usually in the pick time of the day, when volume is high, the upper – level people, like team leader and Service level monitor are screaming loudly to urge us to do more quickly. We feel really stressed because of that noise, while we are very focusing in our task‟ (Do Mai Quyen, Lazmall CS agent, 21 years old) 40 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 A survey related to employees‘ satisfaction toward company‘s physical working environment was conducted to 1000 employees of Lazada, basing on the scale 1 to 5 (1: very bad, 2: bad, 3: acceptable, 4: good, 5: very good). The response is recorded in table 7: Table 7: Employee satisfaction toward company‘s physical working environment Factors Employee satisfaction (score out of 5) Noise 2.1 Temperature 4.3 Light 5 Facility 4.7 Working space 4.3 (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) Following the table 7, noise is the factors that disappointed by employees the most. Noisy office can make CS agents feel uncomfortable and even stress when they are already under high pressure of workload (30). Hearing such sound at work makes the agents more disturbing especially in peak time of the shopping campaigns - when they are really focus on the call resolution. By this way, the stress increases while agents can hardly have chance to feedback to their supervisor real time. 5.2. Potential cause 2: Poor work engagement In the Employee satisfaction survey (ESAT) 2019 showed that, the average employee satisfaction of Lazmall agent is lower than non-Lazmall ones. 41 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Table 8: Employee satisfaction of Lazada in 2019 (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) Following table 8, some significant points that leads to the low satisfaction (less than 3 points, out of 5) among Lazmall team, is the agents do not feel they are supported by their peer, they do not receive the right level of praise and recognition, and are not motivated at work by their tasks. 5.2.1. Potential sub-cause 1: Lack of bonding in team Team climate has significant effect to individual‘s engagement and performance. One of the effective ways to engage and motivate staff is to create open and supportive team culture, to ensure their jobs are correspondent to organizational goals while support employee‘s career development. Or in other word, the role of the team is to initiate environment to nurture the well-being, commitment and performance of individual (31). In return, in defining the success of a team, each individual must be considered as key factor to contribute and to form the team culture (32). However, the bonding in Lazmall team is not solidly built. One point that has been mentioned by Lazmall agent - Duong Thi Suong in the interview is: 42 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 `I hope Lazmall team can co-operate with each other better, especially when there‟s someone new joining the team. I remember months ago when I first join with Lazmall team, I find its difficult to get on with tenure agents. We hardly talked to each other because they only communicate with some of their close colleagues.`(Duong Thi Suong, Lazmall CS, 22 years old) According to Ms. Suong, usually it takes long time for newbies to get on well with current team. Even within a team, some might feel lonely because they do not have chance to talk to others. Literature has proven that the larger number of teammates involving in interaction among each other, the greater mutual interdependence appears. In turn, it helps elevate the cooperation, which again boosts team efficiency. (33) Mr. Khoa admitted that, during the last year, Lazmall team rarely participates in any activities together: ‗It‟s really difficult for us to organize a team activity for Lazmall team, because of the nature of customer service, agents are always have to handle customers‟ inquiries all days of week, from 7am to 10pm. Therefore, the team has to work in shift and the working shifts are different to each other.‘ (Tran Dang Khoa, Head of customer care, 35 years old) The difficulty that prevents Lazmall team to join engagement activity is that the members work in different shifts. For non-Lazmall team, the population is three times compared to Lazmall, so it is easier for them to find back-up support from other team. However, for Lazmall, they can hardly seek for such support, because non-Lazmall agents do not know about Lazmall process. Team bonding activities have role to improve performance of employees. This is because after enjoying those activities together, members have chance to better understand characteristic, weaknesses, strengths and interests of each other (33). To understand more about the reason why Lazmall agent need the bonding in team, ones can refer to figure 12 mentioned in previous part showing the quality score trend of different groups of agent. According to figure 12, for agent Lazmall, it is observed that tenured agents have stable quality score in all calls, while new joins‘ quality usually fluctuates. The quality is mostly decided by how well each agent provides appropriate solution for customers, basing on the process of Lazada. More importantly, this knowledge of process can be shared mutually during the working time, in order to support the new agents, when their knowledge is not as strong as old employees. Ms. Do Mai Quyen – newbies of Lazmall said: 43 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 „The standard operation process of Lazada is long, so it takes time for us to recall knowledge we were trained. It would be great if we can have immediate support from our peer, as you know, although my Team leader does support to answer my question, but there are many times she is busy with her tasks, or maybe she joined meeting with the manager. I hope everyone in the team can discuss more and share experience as well‟ (Do Mai Quyen, Lazmall CS agent, 21 years old) Apparently, the quality performance of Lazmall team can be improve better if the team can be more open in sharing and team bonding is needed to be consolidated. It was proven that, staff working in a culture in which they were able to freely express caring, compassion, affection, and tenderness for one another were more satisfied with their occupations, committed better to the team, and obligated to their performance (35) 5.2.2. Potential sub-cause 2: Unpleasant task The tasks that Lazmall team handles are not pleasant to all of them, which lead to low motivation at work. Ms. Tu shared that: „Lazmall agents have to learn and remember both Lazmall and non-Lazmall SOP, which is so unpleasant and unfair for them. This is one issue we are encountering when recruiting Lazmall agents. Many of them want to become non-Lazmall agents instead‟ (Nguyen Thi Cam Tu, Lazmall Team leader, 29 years old) As mentioned in figure 16, all calls/chats related to Lazmall products are absolutely transferred to Lazmall team, however the reverse way is not applicable. It means, if a Lazmall customer has any further issue related to non-Lazmall products, the Lazmall agents have to support right in the transaction. Therefore, like what Ms. Tu said, her agents have to remember more knowledge. There are 20 SOPs of non-Lazmall and 10 SOPs of Lazmall products (27), so each agent in Lazmall channel has to learn totally 30 SOPs, which is half as many again as the rest staff. Ms. Tu also declared that the process of selecting CS Lazmall is: when there is a need of headcount in this team, the Lazmall TL will announce to recruit agents from non-Lazmall channel. Afterward, each team will provide the list of agents to nominate to Lazmall basing on their performance only. Those agents must meet the quality score of 90% and CSAT score of 88% in the last 2 months. The final decision will be made by Ms. Tu –Lazmall TL, after the interview round. 44 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 For the above process, agents are not asked to identify their willingness to transfer in another team. In the interview with agent Do Mai Quyen, she revealed that: „At first, I was working as a non-Lazmall agent, and it was the time when there was lack of headcount among Lazmall, I was interviewed and forced to transfer to this channel. The management team told me that it is promising over there, but in fact, I see more difficulties doing Lazmall channel. This is the reason I‟m not happy working in this task‟ (Do Mai Quyen, Lazmall CS agent, 21 years old) Ms. Quyen also shared that, her performance has decreased since she moved to new team, as it more difficult for her to get on well with this task. Employees who felt they worked in a loving environment result in higher levels of satisfaction and teamwork, which is leading to staff and customer well-being and performance (35) 5.2.3. Potential sub-cause 3: Limited praise and recognition One reason behind that the Lazmall agents are not engaged to their work, is the appraisal and recognition program is not motivated enough. Performance appraisal is a systematic way to evaluate an individual's performance (36). As discussed previously, the requirements for a Lazmall agent are higher than a normal CS, for CSAT target if 2 % higher, and for SOP to learn is 1.5 times more than a non-Lazmall one (27). Ms. Tu provided information regarding the appraisal system in Lazmall that: „According to our human resources policy, once agent is internal transferred within same department, customer care, their salary and appraisal cannot be changed until end of their labor contract. This is the reason why, so far, the salary and bonus range for non-Lazmall and Lazmall agents are quite similar to each other.‟ (Nguyen Thi Cam Tu, Lazmall Team leader, 29 years old) Performance appraisal system is frequently considered as one of the critical elements to encourage workers‘ motivation (35). Another study illustrated that considering the fairness of reward and recognition program is identified as a critically crucial dimension of performance evaluation for employee encouragement and motivation (37). However, like what Mr. Thien shared, there was a quite similar in the compensation plan between agents of both channels, while we have witnessed the more pressure of tasks that Lazmall agent are handling in figure 16 and table 6 (27). It has been observed that sufficient performance appraisal boost employee productivity, dedication, satisfaction, etc. While insufficient leads to 45 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 down in productivity and lack of work motivation (36). In table 8, the satisfaction of Lazmall staff for the reward and appraisal program is 2.32 out of 5, whereas that number for nonLazmall is 3.19. That is one of the major factors causing low work engagement in Lazmall channel. One recent research has validated a new insight of achieving customer satisfaction is through happy and engaged staff. A happier workforce is apparently inherent in companies‘ competence to deliver greater customer satisfaction, specifically in the online shopping platform like Lazada with close interaction between customers and frontline employees (38). 5.3. Potential cause 3: Robotic staff In the interview with Lazmall customer Ms. Hoang Minh Anh, she insisted that: „Apparently the frontline staff is answering me like a robot, all of them answer similar to each other. For example, when showing empathy to customer, every time I contact, they always say: “We are so sorry for the inconvenience you are facing”. I feel like they do not really empathize with me.‟ (Ms. Hoang Minh Anh, customer of Lazmall, 30 years old) According to sharing from Ms. Hoang Anh, she expected the agents of Lazmall to show real connection with customers, not robotically copying each other. This is not knowledge of SOP that they were trained, but more about the practice of soft-skill. Soft skills are defined as behaviors for friendly and effective intercommunication with others (39). They played a significant role in achieving the success of work performance, and they are requirement for the development of organization (40). Hence, the performance of Lazmall team is seriously impact if the CS staff – who daily directly interacts with customers – is lacking of those skills. Literature explained that achieving soft skills needs blend of both nature and nurture factor. The genetic elements contribute to acquiring them expeditiously, meanwhile the nurtured factors help attain soft skills excessively (41). 5.3.1. Potential sub-cause 1: Lack of soft skill agent The quality staff (QA) has a scorecard to rate the quality of each call/chat basing in a set of criteria. 46 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Table 9: Quality scorecard result divided by criteria (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) According to Table 9, only 87.05% the transactions of Lazmall deliver the soft-skill to maintain customer engagement during the conversation. There are six factors to define the soft-skills requirements, including: Grammar and language use, active listening skill, tone and pace, empathy and rapport building, professionalism and ownership of the issue. While other criteria (compliance & SOP and conversation technical) scored above 90% of coverage, the soft-skill factor is below target of 90%. This needs to be improved within Lazmall agents to effectively solve customer‘s problem in a smooth and pleasant way, along with delivering the knowledge of SOP. In the interview with Ms. Nguyen Thi Cam Tu to identify the cause of low soft-skill CS agent, she mentioned that: „Actually, we cannot blame the agents themselves, because initially, the requirement Lazada set to recruit CS agent from beginning is quite low. We accept all candidates who just graduated from high school and fresher are very welcome. Many of them even rarely use computer before‟ (Nguyen Thi Cam Tu, Lazmall Team leader, 29 years old) Pursuant to Ms. Tu, the set of requirements that Lazada set to customer service agent is simple at the beginning due to mass recruitment for this position needs. Basically, the backgrounds of Lazmall and non-Lazmall channel are similar to each other. Table 10: Educational background of customer service employees in Lazada Education High school College University Lazmall 57% 28% 15% Non-Lazmall 60% 25% 15% (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) 47 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Table 11: Years of experience in same industry prior to Lazada Years of experience under 6 6 -12 more than 1 before Lazada months months year Lazmall 36% 51% 13% Non-Lazmall 40% 48% 12% (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019) The majority of both Lazmall and non-Lazmall agents have maximum educational qualification in high school and have less than 1 year of experience. Soft-skill is something can only to be built up during studying and working time, basing on observation, reading, training, experience and practice (41). As most agents in Lazmall have less time to study and to work, the amount of skills they earn is modest. 5.3.2. Potential sub-cause 2: Limited learning and development opportunity In the interview with Ms. Do Mai Quyen – CS Lazmall – she shared that: „Almost the trainings we can join related to the SOP of Lazmall training. We hardly have chance to join any soft-skill training of company. Maybe because of the updates in knowledge is too much, so we have to prioritize the time for SOP training, to make sure we always deliver correct solution. Otherwise, our quality score will be down seriously‟ (Do Mai Quyen, Lazmall CS agent, 21 years old) Before handling call/chat, each agent is undergone a training class in 2 weeks and continue nesting in another half month. After that, every week, they have to join a weekly refresher to update any changes in SOP. Like Ms. Quyen mentioned, most of training they could join were related to functional training, not improvement training. During the training time, the trainer will deliver fundamental knowledge of SOP to a class sized 15-25 employees. To avoid robotic interaction during the conversation of customers, agents have to sophisticatedly manipulate the knowledge of SOP that they were taught. However, in the interview with Mr. Thien, he admitted that: ‗At first stage of Lazmall, we have not focused much on the training and development. The reason behind is we want the service level to be stable all the time, means agents cannot leave for long training during operation time. Outside working time, they seem tired and many have to stay to clear their backlog. We do not want to put more pressure on them 48 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 about too many things to achieve‟ (Pham Hoang Thien, Customer Service manager, 38 years old). The difficulty Mr. Thien mentioned is about the priority of service level, which is one of the factor build up customer satisfaction for short term. Nevertheless, for long term, it will cause problem. In table 8, the satisfaction score of Lazmall employees toward opportunity for learning and development was 2.85 out of 5; which means there was a room for training to meet agent‘s need of growing. As mentioned in previous part, Lazmall agents initially have limited potential of soft-skill, which could be improved by nurture factor. Every organization needs training and development to improve their performance and achieve company goals (41). It is also an effective method to inspire employee‘s willingness and ability to practice what they can learn in reality (40). 5.4. Cause validation First of all, regarding the stress that Lazmall agents have to face, Mr. Thien emphasized that: „The suddenly high volume in Lazmall channel mostly happens during the Mega online shopping campaign of Lazada, mainly in November and December. For rest of the year, we can always control the forecast as close as real volume.‟ (Pham Hoang Thien, Customer Service manager, 38 years old). Just as what Mr. Thien shared, in Mega campaign of Lazada, mostly Lazmall products were at high discount to attract customers, therefore, more concern from Lazmall customers were received. The busy time of Lazmall is mostly in the end of the year, and some time is out of expectation of the workforce management team to make an accurate forecast. During such peak period, the noise on operation floor increase, because everyone is in a hustle to pull up the service level. Therefore, the stress of Lazmall agent with high volume and distracting noise is temporary. Secondly, for the robotic staff issue, the company is planning a learning and development cause, basing on the sharing of Mr. Khoa: „Through the yearly employee satisfaction survey, we are well-acknowledged about the demand of developing in skill of our employees. Hence, our priority now is to up-skill out agent, for them to have better performance and get moving faster on their career path‟ (Tran Dang Khoa, Head of customer care, 35 years old). 49 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 The company now is developing the L&D human resources, and those employees are sitting side by side with customer service team to identify the training need, as well as to listen well to agent‘s desire of growth. Therefore, according to Mr. Thien, the soft-skill problem will be solved absolutely in a short period of time. Hence, the two potential cause above, including stress at work and robotic staff are eliminated. Lastly, the author is validating the work engagement cause. Mr. Thien admitted that: „We see very low staff turnover rate in Lazmall team, therefore, we ourselves consider that consolidating work engagement in that team is excessive. But maybe we have not appropriately appreciated this issue, until witnessing the good performers in non-Lazmall team underperform when they moved to new team.‟ (Pham Hoang Thien, Customer Service manager, 38 years old). Following what Mr. Thien shared, building work engagement has been underestimated by the leadership team. This is the main cause of low performing Lazmall CS, as it will lead to unhappy and dissatisfied worker, which is consequently followed up by unsatisfied customers (38). A study had proven that work engagement brought a generous affirmative impact on the individual employee productivity (42). Engaged workers are commonly reflexed as the willingness to invest their sense and effort of themselves in their tasks (43). Additionally, all of the measurements of work engagement namely dedication, absorption and vigor also result positively on individual productivity (42). Besides, the engaged staff is not only willing to work harder to achieve great levels of assignment performance, but also voluntarily commit in organizational citizenship ethics (42, 44) Therefore, solving the issue of poor work engagement can effectively help increase Lazmall Cs staff. The updated cause-effect map is presented in below figure: 50 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Figure 24: Updated cause effect map (source: Author synthesis) 6. Alternative Solutions Toward the major cause of lacking in work engagement, causing by three sub causes namely: lack of bonding in team, unpleasant task and limited motivational program, the author has proposed three alternative solutions. To begin with, due to Lazmall team is in short of the connection between its members, the first alternative solution is to design a set of team building activities throughout the year. Next, agent as many Lazmall agents don not find the task pleasant and motivated enough for them, the alternative solution of designing a buddy program in the team to at the same time empower tenured agents and encourage newbies, as well as motivating the co-operation between them. Finally, to solve the issue regarding limited appraisal program, Lazada build up reward and recognition system to frequently push up the KPI competition among employees, so that they have motivation to reach the target better. 51 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 6.1. Alternative solution 1: Design a set of team building activities The phrase "team building" has become popular in recent years, which contains a lot of meanings. Regarding organizational development, team-building not only leverage the realistic experience of the team, but more importantly, it increases the communication and bonding among members, by breaking down political influence, personal barriers and enjoy the fun at work(45). It also encourages individuals to commit to common goals of the organization as the main purpose of team building is to strengthen the productivity and motivation of employees. (45) A well-performed team has members with a certainly mutual purpose, shared trust and respect, great levels of communication and dedication to the success of organization (46). The advantage of making teams is so crucial that many enterprises have built a separate department to establish the standard team building strategy (45). As mentioned previously, for Lazada, it is difficult for Lazmall team to have team building activity together because of limitation of time and back-up resource, and the lack of communication between newbies and tenured agents. Therefore, the first recommendation solution is to design a set of team building activities with needed commitment to complete, including these activities: First activity is setting up daily and weekly team huddle for agents to share difficulty, experience, and together. By organizing shift-huddle, team members became more open to share and increase trust in each other. It also allows employees to give and take of ideas, and it at the same time enables the team to focus on what they are trying to achieve (47). To ensure the deployment of this activity while maintain the production time, the overtime pay should be given to all staff. Second activity is to organize bi-monthly outdoor activities for team to connect to each other outside work place. The purpose is to let Lazmall agents connect soul to soul, discover each other‘s characteristics, hobbies, strengths and weaknesses. From that, they can easily sincerely truly connect at work. For these out-door activity to be deploy, there should be a back-up team for Lazmall. The company needs to build and train a cross-skill team who can both back-up for Lazmall and non-Lazmall agents. Both above activities should be maintain permanently, so the estimated cost per year and benefit of this alternative solution is pointed out below: 52 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Cost: Table 12: Cost for alternative solution 1 No Activities Total cost (VND) 1 Team huddle 188,000,000 Overtime payment: 4 hours/week 162,000,000 Room 26,000,000 2 Outdoor activities 163,000,000 Human management 18,000,000 Human resource (back up team) 36,000,000 Venue 21,000,000 Agency 76,000,000 Logistic 12,000,000 Total estimated (1) + (2) 351,000,000 (Source: Author synthesis) Benefits: There are benefits for this alternative solution: Firstly, it helps the team recognize the target achievement, and from that, can always get well on track to quickly reach the goal of making customer satisfaction. The team will be able to consider the team target as their own target (45); hence, member will be more willing to share and to support each other with SOPs, knowledge, to overcome any difficulty during working time. The goal of Lazmall team can be reached faster. Secondly, team building can create better spirit at work, and bring happiness to employees due to maintain work-life balance (46). Well-being employees can in turn bring out happiness to customer. In research about a big sample of the largest companies all over the world, there exists a great positive statistical connection between happy staff and customer satisfaction. Every one-star increase in employee satisfaction result in 1.3 percent improvement in customer satisfaction scores (38). In the industries where employees have close and frequent interaction with customers, like Ecommerce, that number can be double (38). Thirdly, it will create the branding of Lazmall team, or in other word, increase the value of Lazmall team, which increases the encouragement for willingness and desire to join this team of all agents in Lazada. They can be able to see in advance in benefits they can get, from that, employees will try harder and work more effectively to be chosen for this team. 53 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Ultimately, this alternative solution helps increase the income of company, as when the team reach the target of service quality and increase customer satisfaction, the chance that customer repurchase increase. When customers repurchase many times, they will become a brand advertiser for the company, who can unintentionally attract a lot more potential clients. In general, we can sum up some benefits: - Quickly achieve target of the team - Increase customer happiness and satisfaction - Increase the value of Lazmall team to attract talented employees - Increase income of company from customers 6.2. Alternative solution 2: Organize a buddy program A buddy program is a knowledge sharing and onboarding method used to orient new employees, letting them the chance to quickly integrate with new work environment (48). The idea of this alternative solution is to make tenured agents play the role as buddies of newbies in pair until the newbies reach to normal productivity at work. There will be an additional target to achieve of the buddy pairs, that is basing on the performance improvement newbies while the tenured agents‘ performance still maintain. In case those pairs reach such target, they can get an additional reward. Mr. Khoa acknowledged that: „It is crucial to build the connection between new and present Lazmall agents, so that they can support each other more effectively. It is impossible for the team leader to side by side with newbies all the time, so there will be moments where they feel lost and lack of care‟ (Tran Dang Khoa, Head of customer care, 35 years old) Onboarding buddy program provides context of work for the new hires, which is a valuable commodity. Without work context, a newbie will most likely struggle to thoroughly understand their roles or the way to contribute to the team‘s success (49). Especially when the tasks and the KPI target of Lazmall team are much different from non-Lazmall, so there might be difficult for new agents to adapt. In addition to that, buddies cultivate new employees‘ satisfaction and speed up the productivity for both new hires and the organization (49). Finally, the buddy program is mutually beneficial as it creates opportunity for tenured agents to practice and develop leadership and management skills. Besides, delivering knowledge to others can consolidate ones‘ own knowledge foundation, facilitating the buddies themselves to develop a more profound degree of expertise (49). 54 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 To ensure this program, there should be a clear workload list and benefits than can be acknowledged by buddies. In some case, reassignment of task is needed to balance with this activity. A transparent appraisal program should be given to the buddies once they reach or exceed the expected target. The buddy should ideally goes with new hire in three months – a proper time for an agent to reach their stable performance (27). Some disadvantages can be: - The buddies cannot bear with the higher workload once they have to help other, while having to complete their own task - The buddies are not qualified enough to support and guide newbies, though they enthusiastically and voluntarily apply for this position - It still need supervisor who can control the quality of buddies during their work. That can be a little bit difficult to monitor the KPI of both tasks. Cost and benefits of the second alternative solution in a year are: Cost: Table 13: Cost for alternative solution 2 No Activities 1 Human resource for reallocating task 2 Appraisal program for buddy 3 Human management (to supervise buddy quality) Total cost Total cost (VND) 216,000,000 72,000,000 108,000,000 396,000,000 (Source: Author synthesis) Benefits: There are some benefits of this buddy program: - It improves employees‘ satisfaction. On research of Harvard business review showed that after their first week on the job, newbie with buddy is 23% more satisfied with his work experience in comparison with the one without buddy. The number of difference in satisfaction score increase to 36% in period of 90 days (49). - It helps boosting productivity and performance of the team as a whole. The research pointed out that, the more frequent buddy and new hire can meet, the more productive new hire‘s performance will be (49). In their first 90 days, 56% of new employees who 55 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 have at least one meeting with their buddy informed that they are enabled to rapidly become productive in their role. That number surged to 73% for those who have two to three meetings, 86% for those commit in eight times, and 97% for those who interact above eight times in their first 90 days. (49) - More importantly, it can level up the necessary skills of the buddies and prepare themselves once there is opportunity of promotion in the company. Skills tenured agents can learn when supporting others are: communication, giving feedback, monitoring, etc. 6.3. Alternative solution 3: Change in appraisal scheme to motivate agents As analyzed in previous part, Lazmall agents are lack of motivation due to the appraisal scheme of Lazmall and non-Lazmall are similar, while the target for Lazmall agent to achieve is higher in CSAT score and call volume handle. The appraisal method applying in the team is by grading agent performance in the scale of 5 for monthly KPI incentive and yearly performance review. Currently, the solution that Lazada is applying to fix the above issue is to apply the maximum rating (rating 5) for all Lazmall in several months of the crisis, regardless the actual performance of individuals. Ms. Tu – Team leader of Lazmall shared that: „In the first months applying this exceptional KPI for our team, the agents found it really excited, because they could get the fixed maximum KPI incentive, which is not easy at all to achieve normally. Gradually, they took it for granted and seemed not appreciated that anymore, as it causes some unfairness in the team‟ (Nguyen Thi Cam Tu, Lazmall Team leader, 29 years old) Like Ms. Tu mentioned, some top performers might find it unfair when they work better than the others, however in the end of the month, they still get the same incentive. Meanwhile, some under-performed agents do not have the motivation to try harder. According to literature, financial incentive is supposed to enhance staff motivation because it can be allocated to fulfill the demand that employees want (50). Motivation is an effort in an employee that is always pushing them to meet their needs to achieve both personal and corporate goals (51). Therefore, the process of motivation must base on the point of views of workers in meeting their needs concurrently with the achievement of organizational goals. Needs are the core trigger of the staff's performance against the significance of the company's momentum through a reward (50). For Lazmall agents, as the requirement is higher and the 56 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 KPI target is more difficult to achieve than non- Lazmall channel (26), there exists the demand to receive better treat from the employees. With the current incentive scheme, Lazmall team‘s performance has not improved in performance in the last 6 months, so the author would like to recommend alternative solution 3, which is to design clear task requirements and benefits for Lazmall agents, for them to appreciate the fact of being a Lazmall agent. - Apply 360 degree feedback in the appraisal method, so that the performance of agents can be more accurate. It‘s also a chance to management team and team members to communicate and giving compliments to motivate agents and feedback to improve the weaknesses. This way can help the team to at the same time understand more each other as it involves data collection from multiple different raters (52). This method has been suggested by practitioners and researchers to boost validities of performance assessment, because it allows a much more comprehensive measurement than single-source rating one (52). - Increase the incentive range for Lazmall, to differentiate Lazmall and Non-Lazmall agents‘ benefit. Along with that, the company should set up a standard range for Lazmall agents, in case agents are not in the range, they are ineligible for Lazmall and will come back to Non-Lazmall channel. This way can motivate agent to always try to adapt with the criteria of Lazmall. When employees achieve higher compatibility between their own competence and the job demands, it is more likely to increase work engagement (53). The cost and benefits of this alternative solution is shown below: Cost: Table 14: Cost for alternative solution 3 No Activities Total cost (VND) 1 Apply 360 degree feedback 300,000,000 Designing and proposing program 60,000,000 Cost of teaching/training people on the new process 70,000,000 Human resource to implement 170,000,000 2 Design constrained position requirements and incentive level 422,000,000 Cost of designing new framework 140,000,000 Dollar cost of the increase incentive 210,000,000 Human resource to monitor the implementation 72,000,000 Total estimated (1) + (2) 722,000,000 (Source: Author synthesis) 57 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Benefits: There are several benefits of this alternative solution: • It helps increase individual productivity – the act of recognizing desired behavior increases the repetition of the desired behavior, and therefore productivity. This is classic behavioral psychology. The reinforced behavior supports the organization‘s mission and key performance indicators (54). • Boosting employee satisfaction and enjoyment at workplace, as the higher incentive encourages agents to spend more time focusing on the task and remain less time complaining. It is also proven that, positive incentive helps encourage the knowledge transfer among staff, which facilitates their work better (55) • Direct performance feedback for individuals and teams is objectively provided, from that, employees have more accurate point of view about their strengths and weaknesses. • Higher loyalty and satisfaction scores from customers, as the CSAT score is the fundamental requirement for Lazmall CS to stay in the team. In addition to that, monetary incentives and rewards are forms of controlled motivation, which can create effort to adopt a client orientation (54). 6.4. Solution justification Basing on the cost and benefit analysis of each alternative solution, the author has set up meeting with the management team to make decision on the best choice for the company. According to Mr. Thien, the budget for this investment is 800,000,000 VND and the time bounce for company to witness the improvement is 6 months only. In addition, he also mentioned that the process for proposing a new appraisal scheme in his company is very complicated and take a lot of time to get the approval, because currently it needs to comply with regional policy. From literature‘s view, form of controlled motivation are external pressure, like payoffs, monetary incentives, and rewards or internal pressure, for example sense of self-worth and detention due to feelings of guilt and nervousness (54). The controlled motivation for long term can bring negative effect to work performance, as it causes tress and restrict the creative thinking, focusing ability, work attitude, and other behaviors of employees (54). Therefore, the alternative solution 3 is not appropriate for current situation of Lazmall. Besides ‗controlled motivation‘, there exists a second type, which is called ‗autonomous‘ motivation - a key motive of staff behavioral reaction (56). It is when employee can engage in activities for reasons of pleasure and individual interest (intrinsic motivation) or his own 58 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 profound value and beliefs (identified motivation). Mr. Thien indicated that, he wants the impacts to be long-term and the solution should be able to encourage the volunteer commitment of employees. He agrees with the both alternative solution 1 and 2 and suggest to combines these two plans to apply for Lazmall team. He stated: „Team building activities is an obvious way to inspire and refresh the working spirit of agents, especially after the intense of shopping campaign. Besides that, I am really into the idea of organizing buddy program for newbies, so that the team can always maintain the behavior of supporting each other‟(Pham Hoang Thien, Customer Service manager, 38 years old). The alternatives solution 1 and 2 focus on the intrinsic and identified motivation for employees, by that way, the desire to work harder can be autonomously supported by feelings of enjoyment and appreciation can be reinforced rather than the feelings of obligation and pressure (54). In conclusion, the combination of alternatives solution 1 - Design a set of team building activities and solution 2 - Organize buddy program is considered as the most appropriate one for Lazmall. The total cost for this solution is 747,000,000 VND – which is feasible for Lazada to implement. Table 15: Cost for selected solution No Activities Total cost (VND) 1 Team huddle 188,000,000 Overtime payment: 4 hours/week 162,000,000 Room 26,000,000 2 Outdoor activities 163,000,000 Human management 18,000,000 Human resource (back up team) 36,000,000 Venue 21,000,000 Agency 76,000,000 Logistic 12,000,000 3 Organize buddy program 396,000,000 Human resource for reallocating task 216,000,000 Appraisal program for buddy 72,000,000 Human management (to supervise buddy quality) 108,000,000 Total estimated (1) + (2) 747,000,000 (Source: Author synthesis) 59 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 7. Change plan design 7.1. Objectives There are some objectives in the implementation of the chosen solution: - Consolidating the relation of Lazmall team members, especially relation between newbies and tenured agents - Encouraging the job engagement of Lazmall agents, from that agent can have more positive motivation at work - Increasing employee performance of agents – who directly bring out the satisfaction to customers. 7.2. Expected outcomes In a quantitative research of Cheema et al. (57) regarding impact of employee engagement on the improvement of employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction is evaluated in six elements: Pay, autonomy, task requirements, organizational policies, interaction and professional status. For customer satisfaction, there are 14 item scale to measure, including employee availability, price, payment method, advice, information, staff friendliness, decoration, tidiness of restaurant, quality of good, choice diversity, waiting time, promotion, timing hours, outer layout (57). The result of that study showed that, there is a significant positive relation of frontline employee commitment and employee satisfaction, with βeta equal 0.49. Besides, the standardize coefficient (β) showing the impact of staff engagement to customer satisfaction is 0.31 (57). In another study of Ghuman about the association between employee engagement and employee performance, the result showed that, for each unit increase in the staff engagement will result in 0.5 units in the performance of employees (58). Combine with the in-depth interviews with Mr. Thien, Mr. Khoa and Ms. Tu were conducted to explore the expectation for the change plan. The expected outcomes for the selected solution are: - Quality score of employees will increase by 5% after six months of implementing the buddy program. - Customer satisfaction will increase at least by 3% after six months of deploying the change plan. - Employee satisfaction score toward their tasks increase by 5% after six months. 60 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 After six months of applying the solution, the Quality score, CSAT score and employee satisfaction score will be observed to check whether the chosen solution have achieved the target outcomes of Lazmall. 7.3. Plan implementation The action plan has been made basing on the best solution chosen which is to Design a set of team building activities and solution and organize buddy program. The time bounce for this plan is 6 months from 1st of June 2020 to 1st of December 2020. With the limitation of resources, time and budget, a detailed plan is designed for Lazmall to achieve the target our come of long-term benefit as below: 61 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Table 16: Action plan implementation Stages Task Description Objectives Person in charge Timeline Preparation Propose idea for team building activities Make a plan of team building activities proposal, including purpose, timeline, budget and detailed of each activities Get approval for budget of team building Ms. Tu W1 Jun/2020 Propose idea for buddy program Make a plan of the buddy program definition, purpose, and how to implement Get approval for budget of buddy program Ms. Tu W1 Jun/2020 62 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Stages Implementati on for team engagement Task Description Objectives Person in charge Timeline Book fixed room Find a meeting room with enough equipment like: For Lazmall team to organize Facility for team huddle chairs, round table, whiteboard for the team to weekly and daily team huddle team discuss and share in team huddle W2 Jun/2020 Finding agency to Finding an agency which can meet requirement: has Finding a reasonable agency who HR team W2 organize team more than 5 years of experience in organizing team has experience in organizing team building activities building for group of above 30 members building activities Jun/2020 Renting venue for Find suitable venue for team activities and contact team activities for renting Find suitable location basing on the Facility interest of team and purpose of plan team W2 Jun/2020 logistic Buying food and beverage, logistic for activities To facilitate the activities during Facility and gift for the team the program team W3 Jun/2020 Preparing stuff - Find a resource of Issuing the job description for Lazmall to get To make sure the service level will Mr. Thien back-up agents for application form from non-Lazmall agents, then not be impact when all Lazmall the team organize interview agents are off for outdoor activities W2 Jun/2020 Training back-up Deliver the training about Lazmall agents for Lazmall knowledge for the selected back-up team W3 Jun/2020 product To make sure the service level will Training not be impact when all Lazmall team agents are off for outdoor activities Scheduling suitable Basing on the forecast volume to arrange the team To avoid the impact on quality of Work force W3 time for the team building activities in the time when less impact to serving customer manageme Jun/2020 service level nt team Organize the Send out schedule for Lazmall team and encourage To ensure the plan is successfully Agency and W4Junscheduled activities all members to join activities. deployed in time and budget HR team W4Nov/20 63 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Stages Task Description Objectives Person in Timeline charge Implementati Design task requirement Make a checklist of requirements and benefits of To let tenured agents understand Ms. Tu on for buddy to recruit Buddy in the an ideal buddy clearly about the requirements program team and benefit of being buddy W2 Jun/2020 - Conduct interview to Set up interview with the agents who meet To select the most suitable Ms. Tu select buddies requirements and who have interest in being a buddies for newbies buddy W3 Jun/2020 - Let buddies and newbies have a short To match the interest, Ms. Tu + W4 conversation with each other in turn, and then characteristic of newbies and HR team Jun/2020 they have to complete a survey of characteristic. buddies After the survey result and after collecting feedback separately, buddy pairs are decided - Buddy matching Issuing buddy plan and Set up weekly and monthly target for buddy To encourage a transparent Ms. Tu target for each pair pair, and publish it daily in a competition competition between pairs dashboard W1 Jul/2020 - Monitoring the quality Conduct coaching and feedback session weekly To make sure they are on the Ms. Tu of each buddy pair to point out what they are doing well and what right track needs to be improved W1 Jul - W4 Nov/ 2020 Organize buddy reward Select the well-performed pairs and give praise To motivate agents after all their Mr. Thien W4 and recognition session for them in front of company, along with reward effort + HR team Nov/2020 64 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Stages Task Report and Monthly report evaluation Description Person in Timeline charge - Measure the efficiency of the plans To ensure the plan is up to the right Ms. Tu - Propose adjustment and suggestion if outcomes any Final report for the whole program Objectives Summary of agents performance To observe the effectiveness of the Ms. Tu evaluation prior and after program - Analyze efficiency and lesson learned plan and lesson learned for future programs W4 Jun W4 Nov /2020 W4 - Nov/2020 (Source: Author synthesis) 65 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 8. Conclusion In conclusion, the study has approached the symptom of decrease in customer satisfaction score of Lazmall channel in Lazada. This problem has seriously impacted the net promotion score of Lazmall compare to other competitor online shopping platforms. When customers are unhappy, the chance for business to grow is limited and company will be at the risk of losing customers. Basing on the data of the company and the interviews with key persons as well as some customers of Lazada, the main problem has found as low performing CS staff. Three potential causes of that major problem are identified, which are: Stress at work, poor work engagement and robotic staff. Out of those, the main cause has pointed out as lack of work engagement, according to primary data, interviews and support from literature. The most appropriate solution is combination of designing a set of team building activities and organizing buddy program. With the proposed solution, Lazada expects to increase the work engagement and motivation of employees, from that, Lazmall CS agents‘ performance and satisfaction can be boosted, which can in return increase customer satisfaction of this channel. 9. Supporting information 9.1. Methodology: With the time and cost limitation of the problem solving in organization project, this study is focusing in the main problem and the main cause leading to decrease in customer satisfaction score in Lazmall channel at Lazada. Type of data process: - Primary data: Qualitative research Secondary data: Lazada company structure, Internal report of Lazada, Literature in journals and researches. Type of research tools to collect primary data: - Qualitative research: in-depth interview and focus group 9.2. Interview guide Research objective: To investigate the problem leads to decrease in customer satisfaction in Lazmall department in 2019, what is the main cause and propose the most appropriate solution to solve that cause. Duration: 10 – 20 minutes Overall discussion framework: 66 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 No Key sessions 1 2 3 Overall background Objectives Timing To understand the current situation of Lazmall 2–3 department minutes Explore the critical To explore the critical problem that leads to low problem and define the customer satisfaction symptom, and find out the main cause main cause of problem The solution To find out the most appropriate solution 5 – 10 minutes 5 – 10 minutes Detail interview content: Group 1 Management Group 2 Group 3 Team Agents Customers x x X Could you please introduce about 1 yourself (name, age, work experience) Do you buy Lazmall products and what do you expect when buying those X 2 products? What do you expect when contacting X 3 customer service staff of Lazmall What were your expectations towards Lazmall CS staff from the first day of 4 building this team? x What is your level of satisfaction when purchasing Lazmall product? And X please give the reasons for your choice What is your feedback toward Lazmall x 5 customer service? Can you access the current situation of 6 Lazmall CS team? x What factors do you think lead to the decrease in customer satisfaction of 7 Lazmall CS team recently? x x 67 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 What reasons do you think are the causes for the low-performed Lazmall CS staff? Which one is the most 8 significant and why? x x What are your difficulties so far that lead to decrease in your performance and the whole Lazmall team's in recent x 9 month? What do you expect to be changed, in order to improve the current situation of x 10 Lazmall team? What is your suggestion to Lazmall customer service team to make X 11 customer happier? What solutions can you suggest to solve the above root cause, in order to 12 increase customer satisfaction? x x x x x x What is your opinion about the impact of the above solution and what are the 13 possible restrictions? What alternative solutions can be applied to improve the current situation 14 of Lazmall CS team? 68 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 9.3. Transcript Duration of interview: 10-20 minutes Location: Lazada office, 19th floor, Saigon center building, 67 Le Loi Street, Dist. 1, HCM. In-depth interview 1: Interviewer: Ho Hoang Viet Linh Interviewee: Mr. Tran Dang Khoa Title: Head of customer care of Lazada Vietnam Age: 35 years old Working experience: More than 10 years of experience in customer service of E-commerce industry Linh: Good morning. First of all, I would like to thank you for spending time for the meeting with me today. Could you please introduce about yourself (name, age, work experience) Mr. Khoa: My name is Tran Dang Khoa and at the moment I‘m working at Lazada with the position as Head of customer care of Lazada Vietnam. I have more than 10 years of experience in customer service of E-commerce industry. Linh: What were your expectations towards Lazmall CS staff from the first day of building this team? Mr. Khoa: This was our baby project for a long time and so far, Lazmall remains our first concern for any of our decision. We would like to build a strong and effective Lazmall team, in order to pull up the experience for Lazada buyers, by providing them a special care that they have never got before. Linh: Can you access the current situation of Lazmall CS team? Mr. Khoa: Well, the customer satisfaction score of Lazmall is not as good as my expectation, especially since the second half of 2019. Linh: What factors do you think lead to the decrease in customer satisfaction of Lazmall CS team recently? Mr. Khoa: We well aware that Lazada always have to develop and improve day by day to not be left behind by our friends Shopee, Tiki and Sendo. Consumers become wiser to compare between sellers in order to choose the best service. They have a community online and even 69 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 offline to share shopping experience on Ecommerce. Hence, if we do not stay focus for a second, a small mistake can be made and gone viral, eventually customers will go to other shopping platform. Linh: What reasons do you think are the causes for the low-performed Lazmall CS staff? Which one is the most significant and why? Mr. Khoa: I myself believe that the Lazmall agents did not quite passionate in doing their best, although they are very good at first. They seems not happy working in Lazmall and without a happy employee, we cannot have happy customers. Linh: What solutions can you suggest to solve the above root cause, in order to increase customer satisfaction? Mr. Khoa: The management team should sit for a while to understand the agent‘s voice and their difficulty, from there, we can propose a suitable solution. From my point of view, it is crucial to build the connection between new and present Lazmall agents, so that they can support each other more effectively. It is impossible for the team leader to side by side with newbies all the time, so there will be moments where they feel lost and lack of care Linh: What is your opinion about the impact of the above solution and what are the possible restrictions? Mr. Khoa: The connection of team member will increase, and the agents will enjoy their work more, besides the stress they are dealing every day. It‘s really difficult for us to organize a team activity for Lazmall team, because of the nature of customer service, agents are always have to handle customers‘ inquiries all days of week, from 7am to 10pm. Therefore, the team has to work in shift and the working shifts are different to each other. Linh: What alternative solutions can be applied to improve the current situation of Lazmall CS team? Mr. Khoa: Well, I think, there can be some course to up skill the Lazmall CS staff. Through the yearly employee satisfaction survey, we are well-acknowledged about the demand of developing in skill of our employees. Hence, our priority now is to up-skill out agent, for them to have better performance and get moving faster on their career path. Linh: Thank you so much Mr. Khoa for spending your valuable time with me to day for the interview. Wish you a fruitful working day. Mr. Khoa: You are welcome. 70 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 In-depth interview 2: Interviewer: Ho Hoang Viet Linh Interviewee: Mr. Pham Hoang Thien Title: Customer Service manager of Lazada Vietnam Age: 38 years old Working experience: More than 12 years of experience in customer service of E-commerce industry Linh: Good morning. First of all, I would like to thank you for spending time for the meeting with me today. Could you please introduce about yourself (name, age, work experience) Mr. Thien: My name is Pham Hoang Thien, I‘m the Customer Service manager of Lazada Vietnam and I have more than 12 years of experience in customer service of E-commerce industry Linh: What were your expectations towards Lazmall CS staff from the first day of building this team? Mr. Thien: I have been directly interviewing and picking one by one to Lazmall team, in order to make sure their quality meets our expectation at first. This is the reason why during the operation period of Lazmall, I hardly involved in the performance of staff Linh: Can you access the current situation of Lazmall CS team? Mr. Thien: CSAT score of Lazmall team has been a crisis in the last quarter of 2019 that draws concern from not only Lazada Vietnam‘s CEO but also the regional management team. This reflects the fact that all the customers‘ attitude toward Lazmall team has been gone against our expectation of giving customers a better online shopping experience. Linh: What factors do you think lead to the decrease in customer satisfaction of Lazmall CS team recently? Mr. Thien: The KPI of Lazmall team is a crisis problem in these months, while all the numbers of transaction quality, response speed are falling, and the number of backlogs increases more and more. This is unacceptable due to the fact that we have selected the best performed agent to work here. The suddenly high volume in Lazmall channel mostly happens 71 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 during the Mega online shopping campaign of Lazada, mainly in November and December. For rest of the year, we can always control the forecast as close as real volume. Linh: What reasons do you think are the causes for the low-performed Lazmall CS staff? Which one is the most significant and why? Mr. Thien: In my opinion, the CS agents themselves are having problem with their skill. A lot of customers‘ feedback that they are responding like robot, without feeling and empathy. At first stage of Lazmall, we have not focused much on the training and development. The reason behind is we want the service level to be stable all the time, means agents cannot leave for long training during operation time. Outside working time, they seem tired and many have to stay to clear their backlog. We do not want to put more pressure on them about too many things to achieve. Linh: What solutions can you suggest to solve the above root cause, in order to increase customer satisfaction? Mr. Thien: I think we should invest more time and cost in team building activity for Lazmall, as right now, the spirit of the members is not so positive. We see very low staff turnover rate in Lazmall team, therefore, we ourselves consider that consolidating work engagement in that team is excessive. But maybe we have not appropriately appreciated this issue, until witnessing the good performers in non-Lazmall team underperform when they moved to new team. Linh: What is your opinion about the impact of the above solution and what is the possible restriction? Mr. Thien: Team building activities is an obvious way to inspire and refresh the working spirit of agents, especially after the intense of shopping campaign. However, we should concern about the time to schedule and cost. Linh: What alternative solutions can be applied to improve the current situation of Lazmall CS team? Mr. Thien: Besides that, I am really into the idea of organizing buddy program for newbies, so that the team can always maintain the behavior of supporting each other Linh: Thank you so much Mr. Thien for spending your valuable time with me to day for the interview. Wish you a fruitful working day. Mr. Thien: It‘s my pleasure. Have a nice day. 72 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 In-depth interview 3: Interviewer: Ho Hoang Viet Linh Interviewee: Ms. Nguyen Thi Cam Tu Title: Lazmall Team leader Age: 29 years old Working experience: More than 5 years of experience in customer service of E-commerce industry Linh: Good morning. First of all, I would like to thank you for spending time for the meeting with me today. Could you please introduce about yourself (name, age, work experience) Ms. Tu: My name is Tu and I‘m working as a Lazmall Team leader. I‘m 29 years old and I have more than 5 years of experience in customer service of E-commerce industry. Linh: What were your expectations towards Lazmall CS staff from the first day of building this team? Ms. Tu: I expect that they will together with me to bring the team on top of Customer service department. Linh: Can you access the current situation of Lazmall CS team? Ms. Tu: The CSAT of Lazmall team had been always retained over target of 90% since the first day we started. However, recently, that number becomes the most serious concern for all of us. There are too many customers raise DSAT every day that it becomes more difficult for us to increase the overall score. Linh: What factors do you think lead to the decrease in customer satisfaction of Lazmall CS team recently? Ms. Tu: For external reason, I think it‘s because of delivery issue. Right now, all our shipment providers are our partners, not our subsidiaries (even Lazada express – Lex). We have a separate contract between Lazada and the third party logistic, however, we acknowledge that they do serve other business, like Shopee, Tiki, etc. Because of that, in the high season of sales with high volumes of orders in all e-commerce sites, problem with delivery happen the most often. For internal reason, Lazmall agents have to learn and remember both Lazmall and non-Lazmall SOP, which is so unpleasant and unfair for them. 73 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 This is one issue we are encountering when recruiting Lazmall agents. Many of them want to become non-Lazmall agents instead. Linh: What reasons do you think are the causes for the low-performed Lazmall CS staff? Which one is the most significant and why? Ms. Tu: It is because of the stress that somehow exists in the team. We have to handle large volume of customers, especially in campaign season. The Lazmall CS has to work overtime more than non-CS agents, because we have no back-up resource. In recent months, every day we received exceed numbers of actual calls coming in comparing to forecast. For example, the forecast of customer volume in December is 1000 calls/day, however actually have to take 1500 calls. In case we drop the call, service level target will be impacted. Actually, we cannot blame the agents themselves, because initially, the requirement Lazada set to recruit CS agent from beginning is quite low. We accept all candidates who just graduated from high school and fresher are very welcome. Many of them even rarely use computer before. Linh: What solutions can you suggest to solve the above root cause, in order to increase customer satisfaction? Ms. Tu: Actually, we are fixing the situation by offering the maximum level of KPI incentive for all agents Lazmall. In the first months applying this exceptional KPI for our team, the agents found it really excited, because they could get the fixed maximum KPI incentive, which is not easy at all to achieve normally. Gradually, they took it for granted and seemed not appreciated that anymore, as it causes some unfairness in the team. Therefore, I suggest changing the scheme of applying appraisal, in a fairer way, like basing on 360 degree feedback. Linh: What is your opinion about the impact of the above solution and what is the possible restriction? Ms. Tu: I think a new appraisal scheme will effectively work in terms of motivating the agents to try harder and perform better. However, according to our human resources policy, once agent is internal transferred within same department, customer care, their salary and appraisal cannot be changed until end of their labor contract. This is the reason why, so far, the salary and bonus range for non-Lazmall and Lazmall agents are quite similar to each other. 74 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Linh: What alternative solutions can be applied to improve the current situation of Lazmall CS team? Ms. Tu: Organizing teamwork activities or kind of competition to consolidate the relation in team. Linh: Thank you so much Ms. Tu for spending your valuable time with me to day for the interview. Wish you a fruitful working day Ms. Tu: You too, goodbye. In-depth interview 4: Interviewer: Ho Hoang Viet Linh Interviewee: Ms. Duong Thi Suong Title: Lazmall CS agent Age: 22 years old Working experience: More than 1 years of experience in Lazada Customer service agent position Linh: Good morning. First of all, I would like to thank you for spending time for the meeting with me today. Could you please introduce about yourself (name, age, work experience) Ms. Suong: Hello Ms. Linh, my name is Duong Thi Suong and I‘m the Lazmall agent. I have been working with Lazada for more than 1 year. Linh: What factors do you think lead to the decrease in customer satisfaction of Lazmall CS team recently? Ms. Suong: I think because customers have increase in demand. When customers complain to us, they always compare that why Shopee and Tiki agents provide solution for them in this way but Lazada agents answer in other way. They also compare the policy, the products and the price with other platforms. They should be understood that different online platform has different policy and we just follow our policy. Linh: What are your difficulties so far that lead to decrease in your performance and the whole Lazmall team's in recent month? 75 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Ms. Suong: I was forced to join Lazmall CS team. I used to work in non-Lazmall team, and I was quite comfortable with that. However, since I was picked to Lazmall, my performance tends to decrease. We have to end up the call in hurry, and sometimes we avoid asking customers whether they still have and further issues, which is mandatory in the quality scorecard. Hence, QA often minus our quality score when those call are audited. Our team leader always urges us to idle all the time and we cannot let any customer waiting on queue for so long. Linh: What do you expect to be changed, in order to improve the current situation of Lazmall team? Ms. Suong: I hope the process of Lazmall can be more supportive and faster for customers, otherwise, they will keep comparing and complaining. In addition to that, I hope Lazmall team can co-operate with each other better, especially when there‘s someone new joining the team. Linh: What solutions can you suggest to solve the above root cause, in order to increase customer satisfaction? Ms. Suong: I suggest there should be some sharing session between the experienced agents to newbies like me. Linh: What is your opinion about the impact of the above solution and what are the possible restrictions? Ms. Suong: The benefit is newbies can improve the quality score and have chance to learn the way to deal with difficult customers from tenured agents. The restriction is time, because we have to online with customers 8 hours per day. Linh: What alternative solutions can be applied to improve the current situation of Lazmall CS team? Ms. Suong: I hope Lazmall team can co-operate with each other better, especially when there‘s someone new joining the team. I remember months ago when I first join with Lazmall team, I find it difficult to get on with tenure agents. We hardly talked to each other because they only communicate with some of their close colleagues. Linh: Thank you so much Ms. Suong for spending your valuable time with me to day for the interview. Wish you a fruitful working day Ms. Suong: Thank you, my pleasure for this sharing. 76 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 In-depth interview 5: Interviewer: Ho Hoang Viet Linh Interviewee: Ms. Do Mai Quyen Title: Lazmall CS agent Age: 21 years old Working experience: Less than 3 months of experience in Lazmall Customer service agent position Linh: Good morning. First of all, I would like to thank you for spending time for the meeting with me today. Could you please introduce about yourself (name, age, work experience) Ms. Quyen: Hello Ms. Linh, my name is Do Mai Quyen and I‘m a newbie of Lazmall agent. I have been working with Lazada for just less than 3 months. Linh: What factors do you think lead to the decrease in customer satisfaction of Lazmall CS team recently? Ms. Quyen: The product quality, I think. In Lazmall, more than 50% of the contact reason for complaint is about ―Problem with items received‖ and ―where is my order‖. The Lazmall products fulfilled by Lazada often miss freebies and this issue once happens, it will always happen systematically. We also have a lot of issues with the logistic partner, which we have to handle more complaints from customers. We really understand with customer that when they choose the Express service means they are willing to pay more for delivery with the demand of getting the goods for urgent purpose, otherwise, customer should have chosen Standard or Economy method. Most customer complain with us about the ―Same day delivery‖, because it‘s already beyond they date that logistic partner commits. It‘s not our fault and the irrational thing is we cannot push 3PL Linh: What are your difficulties so far that lead to decrease in your performance and the whole Lazmall team's in recent month? Ms. Quyen: What makes me distracted the most is the noise we are hearing every day? Usually in the pick time of the day, when volume is high, the upper – level people, like team leader and Service level monitor are screaming loudly to urge us to do more quickly. We feel really stressed because of that noise, while we are very focusing in our task. In addition to that, almost the trainings we can join related to the SOP of Lazmall training. We hardly have 77 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 chance to join any soft-skill training of company. Maybe because of the updates in knowledge is too much, so we have to prioritize the time for SOP training, to make sure we always deliver correct solution. Otherwise, our quality score will be down seriously Linh: What do you expect to be changed, in order to improve the current situation of Lazmall team? Ms. Quyen: I expect Lazada can improve the product quality and the logistic partner in future. In the meantime, I hope the noise issue can be solved soon, especially during campaign time. Linh: What solutions can you suggest to solve the above root cause, in order to increase customer satisfaction? Ms. Quyen: The standard operation process of Lazada is long, so it takes time for us to recall knowledge we were trained. It would be great if we can have immediate support from our peer, as you know, although my Team leader does support to answer my question, but there are many times she is busy with her tasks, or maybe she joined meeting with the manager. I hope everyone in the team can discuss more and share experience as well Linh: What is your opinion about the impact of the above solution and what are the possible restrictions? Ms. Quyen: I believe Lazmall‘s quality score and CSAT score will increase, because we can give quick solution to customer with our peers‘ support. Linh: What alternative solutions can be applied to improve the current situation of Lazmall CS team? Ms. Quyen: At first, I was working as a non-Lazmall agent, and it was the time when there was lack of headcount among Lazmall, I was interviewed and forced to transfer to this channel. The management team told me that it is promising over there, but in fact, I see more difficulties doing Lazmall channel. This is the reason I‘m not happy working in this task. Therefore, I suggest that the process of recruiting Lazmall agents should be changed, basing on both interest and performance of employees. Linh: Thank you so much Ms. Quyen for spending your valuable time with me to day for the interview. Wish you a fruitful working day Ms. Quyen: You are very welcome. 78 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 In-depth interview 6: Interviewer: Ho Hoang Viet Linh Interviewee: Ms. Hoang Minh Anh Title: Lazmall customer Age: 25 years old Purchasing experience: More than 3 years of experience buying products online Linh: Good morning. First of all, I would like to thank you for spending time for the meeting with me today. Could you please introduce about yourself (name, age, work experience) Ms. Minh Anh: Good morning, my name is Hoang Minh Anh and I have more than 3 years shopping online on various website, including Lazada. Linh: Do you buy Lazmall products and what do you expect when buying those products? Ms. Minh Anh: Yes of course! Lazada advertises a lot of benefit for customers buying Lazmall products. I expect an outstanding service quality. However, when I have problem with the item received, the way that a Lazmall CS handle my issue is similar to the time I bought a normal product and contacted to non-Lazmall agents. I did not see any special priority regarding the post-purchase support here‘. Linh: What do you expect when contacting customer service staff of Lazmall? Ms. Minh Anh: Faster resolution, less waiting time and nicer behavior Linh: What is your level of satisfaction when purchasing Lazmall product? And please give the reasons for your choice. Ms. Minh Anh: Well, maybe medium low! I chose Lazmall product because Lazada guarantee genuine quality and an express delivery. Last time, I bought a Lazmall purse for my friend‘s birthday, but they did not deliver on time and it ruined my plan, such a terrible experience. Linh: What is your feedback toward Lazmall customer service? Ms. Minh Anh: Quite lack of responsibility in terms of solving customer‘s issue. I feel like talking with a robot with no understanding and no empathy to customer. The answer they provide is not in time, which makes me feel irritated. 79 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Linh: What is your suggestion to Lazmall customer service team to make customer happier? Ms. Minh Anh: They staff should be more caring and spending more time to understand customers better, like agents in Tiki. Apparently the Lazmall frontline staff is answering me like a robot, all of them answer similar to each other. For example, when showing empathy to customer, every time I contact, they always say: ―We are so sorry for the inconvenience you are facing‖. I feel like they do not really empathize with me. Linh: Thank you so much Ms. Minh Anh for spending your valuable time with me to day for the interview. Wish you a fruitful working day Ms. Minh Anh: Ok. Thank you and have a good day too. In-depth interview 7: Interviewer: Ho Hoang Viet Linh Interviewee: Ms. Nguyen Thuc Hien Title: Lazmall customer Age: 27 years old Purchasing experience: More than 1 years of experience buying products online Linh: Good morning. First of all, I would like to thank you for spending time for the meeting with me today. Could you please introduce about yourself (name, age, work experience) Ms. Thuc Hien: Good morning, my name is Nguyen Thuc Hien and I have more than 1 years shopping online on Lazada. Linh: Do you buy Lazmall products and what do you expect when buying those products? Ms. Thuc Hien: Yes sometime. I expect good quality. However, when I purchased on Lazmall, the item still got problems like wrong delivered, broken or missing freebies. This really got me lose hope about Lazmall products in general, because I know that I had to pay more, but the quality still not too outstanding and worthy. Linh: What do you expect when contacting customer service staff of Lazmall? Ms. Thuc Hien: Well, I just hope they can understand my situation and resolve it at first place. I do not want to contact many time. I do not want to wait in long time for the resolution. 80 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Linh: What is your level of satisfaction when purchasing Lazmall product? And please give the reasons for your choice. Ms. Thuc Hien: I‘m not satisfied when the products have problem because the return process is long and complicated for customer. Linh: What is your feedback toward Lazmall customer service? Ms. Thuc Hien: Bad customer service. They promise me again and again and ask me to wait for 48 hours more than two times. I am loosing trust to Lazmall service. The CS staff was talking to me so robotic and unfriendly, like they are in rush. Linh: What is your suggestion to Lazmall customer service team to make customer happier? Ms. Thuc Hien: They staff should improve their softs-kill and should be friendlier to customers. In addition to that, we expect an appropriate solution to Lazmall customers, provided by the staff in a professional manner. Linh: Thank you so much Ms. Thuc Hien for spending your valuable time with me to day for the interview. Wish you a fruitful working day Ms. Thuc Hien: Goodbye and have a happy day. In-depth interview 8: Interviewer: Ho Hoang Viet Linh Interviewee: Mr. Nguyen Duc Hung Title: Lazmall and non-Lazmall customer Age: 28 years old Purchasing experience: More than 2 years of experience buying products online Linh: Good morning. First of all, I would like to thank you for spending time for the meeting with me today. Could you please introduce about yourself (name, age, work experience) Mr. Hung: Good morning, my name is Nguyen Duc Hung and I have more than 2 years shopping online on Lazada. Linh: Do you buy Lazmall products and what do you expect when buying those products? Mr. Hung: Yes, of course. Because I expect better product quality with more guarantee policy from Lazada. Sometime I also buy non-Lazmall products as well. 81 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 Linh: What do you expect when contacting customer service staff of Lazmall? Mr. Hung: I do not understand why sometime I call Lazada, the staff asks for my issues and stated that they understood my issue, but they asked me to wait for them to transfer to Lazmall customer service staff. It really takes my time and sometime, I decided to hang up the phone because of that. I do not care who will solve my problem, I just want to have the solution in time. Linh: What is your level of satisfaction when purchasing Lazmall product? And please give the reasons for your choice. Mr. Hung: Not as good as my expectation. Sometimes problems with item received still happened, and the delivery time is not always as promised Linh: What is your feedback toward Lazmall customer service? Mr. Hung: Not so impressive comparing to non-Lazmall line. I mean their skills, behavior and knowledge, in my opinion are similar to non-Lazmall agents. Linh: What is your suggestion to Lazmall customer service team to make customer happier? Mr. Hung: They should show more enthusiasm when interacting with customers and be able to bring a wow service to customers. Linh: Thank you so much Mr. Hung for spending your valuable time with me to day for the interview. 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Journal of Business Studies Quarterly 2015 12;7(2):139-148. (58) Ghuman K. A Prognostic Examination of Functional and Emotional Employee Engagement Drivers and their Impact on Employee Performance. FIIB Business Review 2016 Apr;5(2):78-87. 88 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999 APPENDIX Lazada Customer service Survey 1: How would you rate the support you received? Bạn đánh giá như thế nào về sự hỗ trợ của Nhân viên Chăm sóc Khách hàng? Good, I'm satisfied/ Tốt, tôi hài lòng Bad, I'm not satisfied Không, tôi chưa hài lòng 2: What would you like our agent to improve?/ Theo bạn, Nhân viên Chăm sóc Khách hàng của Lazada cần cải thiện những gì? Knowledge/ Kiến thức nghiệp vụ Response Time/ Thời gian phản hồi Friendliness/ Thái độ thân thiện Others/ Khác 3: What else would you like Lazada to improve?/ Theo bạn, Lazada cần cải thiện những gì? Delivery Experience/ Dịch vụ Vận chuyển Product Quality/ Chất lượng Sản phẩm Others/ Khác 4: Feedback/Comments/ Ý kiến khác 89 VIẾT THUÊ LUẬN VĂN THẠC SĨ – LUẬN ÁN TIẾN SĨ Website: https://luanvanaz.com | Mail: luanvanaz@gmail.com | Phone: 092.4477.999