HelpMe Telecom - Service Support Organization (SSO) Operating Plan

Abstract

Introduction: HelpMe Telecom is a leading telecom company, and has had a string of highly successful quarters. The company’s revenues are increasing mainly due to the explosive growth in the wireless sector. HelpMe Telecom also offers a suite of wire line products and local telephone service to a wide range of customer and business market segments. One key issue facing HelpMe Telecom today is customer satisfaction; the company has yet to increase its ratings amongst its principal competitors today. Service Support Organization: Service Support Organization (SSO) is one business unit which supports the sales and marketing units. SSO handles customer orders for various wire line products. SSO’s order volumes have increasing for the past few months, and the organization is faced with decreasing order quality, extremely long order processing intervals, employee morale and employee turnover; these issues have significantly affected customer satisfaction ratings. An extensive situational analysis of SSO done for the field project indicates that that the focus of any improvements needs to be on the people and the overall ordering process existing within SSO. The order process today lacks the project management purview which is needed to ensure accountability and assign responsibility to each of the suppliers in the ordering process. Without proper metrics in place, SSO also finds it difficult to drive performance with its suppliers. The current ‘own-the-order’ culture within SSO is also impacting performance. The culture is truly focused on helping customers one-at-a-time; whereas a culture shift is needed to help improve the process, which in turn would help many customers at a time. With these recommendations, SSO team has compiled process improvement initiatives and action plans; in addition metrics have been identified to validate these initiatives. Conclusion: With HelpMe Telecom facing intense competition externally, SSO is only more at pressure to deliver. With customer satisfaction ratings decreasing, the current SSO management team understands the need and has accepted the challenge in trying to change employee culture, processes and systems that have stymied the organization for past ten years or more.