Using Strong Emotional Intelligence to Manage Conflicts: Abudi: Consulting Groups (ACG) clients, an organization that provides IT and desktop support services and has grown substantially over the last year, has noticed that there are an increasing number of conflicts between their customer service support personnel and their customers. There are 8 customer service support personnel who support software and hardware for a US-wide customer base. Initially, customer service support personnel interacted with 2 3 key, large corporate customers each as well as taking turns responding to incoming support calls or emails from other customers. However, as the organization has grown, each customer service support employee now supports 4 6 key, large corporate customers each, and continues to take turns responding to support calls or emails. These corporate customers are demanding and usually require customer service staff to work close to 10 hour days. Add to that challenge the numerous calls and emails that come in from other customers. Targets for response times to corporate customers are short, effectively requiring immediate attention; phone calls must be answered by the second ring and emails responded to within 1 hour of receipt.While the organization recognizes the need to hire additional staff, this will likely not happen for at least another 12 16 months given a number of other priorities. However, the organization cannot continue with these conflicts between customer support staff and customers without a serious impact to the bottom line.

Given the rapid growth, corporate customers are sometimes serviced by a customer service support person who is not their main point of contact. This can be stressful for these customers who have developed one-on-one relationships with the organizations customer service employees. Having to deal with someone else has required more time on customer service calls.ACG scheduled conversations with the 8 customer service personnel, their managers and a few of the organizations corporate customers with whom they had long term relationships. Here is what we identified in these conversations. Nothing, by the way, was surprising.

• Customers felt
  • The level of service was not as high as previously.
  • The loss of their key point of contact for all issues made them perceive that the organization did not value their business.
  • The rapid growth in the organization was not their issue and they felt that there were suffering because the organization was understaffed.
• Customer service personnel felt
  • Overworked, tired and frustrated.
  • They lacked the tools to deal with angry and upset customers.
  • The organization did not appreciate the stress they were under.
• Customer service personnels management felt
  • Powerless to address the concerns of their staff.
  • Backed into a corner by their leadership to continue to provide the highest level of service with less resources.

We decided that helping these 8 customer service personnel explore, understand, acknowledge and learn to use their emotions in the right way would be valuable to them in getting through the next 12 16 months. With emotional intelligence training and coaching, these 8 customer service personnel would be better able to

• manage their own emotions and therefore how they react when they are under stress
• recognize and therefore manage the emotions of their customers
• reduce and, if they arise, manage through conflicts and less than positive interactions

An analysis of technology showed that the tool in use by the customer service personnel was limited and outdated. It worked when the organization was much smaller; but was ineffective now. We worked to make the business case that an improvement in the technology used to track and manage customer calls and interactions would support these 8 customer service personnel to manage a much larger and demanding customer base as well as enable for better understanding and tracking of customer issues. We also highlighted that as the organization continued to grow, the technology would enable for better support and management of customers, thereby providing a competitive advantage to the organization.

Six months later, we evaluated the number of conflicts after four months to see if we saw a reduction in customer complaints and met with the 8 customer service personnel and their managers to check in on their perceptions. We found the following:

• Customer service personnel either successfully avoided getting into a conflict situation with a customer or reduced the impact/duration of the conflict if they did get into it.
• Management reported fewer customer complaints due to perceived poor service and attitudes of customer service personnel.
• The new technology enables for quicker response to customers because it did a better job routing customer calls or emails from non-corporate customers to personnel, thereby ensuring a more even distribution of support calls or emails.
• The results of a survey to the corporate customers indicated that they had a higher satisfaction rate than the previous six months.

The ability to recognize our emotions and what triggers strong emotions, enables us to learn how to manage those emotions. Similarly, when we can recognize the emotions of others, we can avoid situations where we trigger their emotions and rather use that information to have better communication and collaboration with others, avoiding or reducing conflict overall.

a: How does emotional intelligence affect an employees performance at work? And how did the Abudi Consulting Group manage the conflicts among employees and customers? (6)

b:According to the above case study, why is the technology so important in the organization for the interaction and engagement of the customer service? Elaborate with examples. (6)