Synthesis Drain Flow with the slogan of When Your Drain Won t Go, Call Drain Flow wrapped

in billboards since 1960 s is a large residential and commercial plumbing maintenance firm operating in United States. Drain Flow s business relies on Yellow Pages and Internet. The usual process is customers calling in to describe plumbing problems or submit online requests and to receive a return call with information within 24 hours, Order Processors then to listen to the problem and assess whether a plumber or plumber assistant is needed for the service call, and job completion thereafter is advised via cell phone with billing representative to transmit the fee to service representative for customer payment. Lastly, billing representative to take customers credit card payments by phone or email an invoice for online payment. It uses specialization to reduce costs but had been having growing customer complaints. With the alarming number, Lee Reynaldo, Rain Flow s Regional Manager, sent surveys to customers. Her theory was Problem on employees not motivated to provide the same customer service as the competitors . The result validated her fears, 60% said they were satisfied with experience and would use Drain Flow again, 40% said that experience was not good and 30% would use competitors if in any chance they will be having plumbing problems in the future. Another issue was on Job Design. Currently, Drain Flow has 2000 employees on four basic categories: Plumbers, Plumber s assistants, Order Processors and Billing Representatives. Given that it wants to maintain low cost, salaries were orchestrated in a manner that it offers high wages for plumbers, one quarter of it for Plumber Assistants and Order Processors having same salaries as Billing Processors as but less than the assistants. Another issue also raised was on specialization equated to customer dissatisfaction. One in four people who call Drain Flow to hire a plumber are worse than dissatisfied, and the remaining 75% ending in customer service encounter resulted in other problems . Complaints on response time and cost, wrong persons sent for the job, frustrations of Order Processors as merely call takers and billing representatives as being only tail end of the process were some issues raised. Apart from the issues escalated, a problem on emotional labour was also observed. A survey on Drain Flow s worker attitudes showing less satisfaction than workers in other comparable has not yet been addressed. Drain Flow s major concern had been on cutting costs not on the pressing soft issue on employee satisfaction. Lee is proposing on implementing cash rewards to improve performances and moderate cash to plumber or plumber s assistant for having no complaints from customers and larger cash rewards for customer satisfaction. Point of View The group takes the point of view of Lee Reynaldo, Regional Manager at Drain Flow for 2 years. She used to work for a newer competing chain, Lightning Plumber which draws more

and more customers from Drain Flow. She however was not happy on how things are going as environment is not as critical as the former. Statement of the Problem What ways can be adapted to standardize Drain Flow s hiring process? What can management do to address issues on job design and job characteristics? How can management ensure successful implementation of the new rewards system?

General Objective: y to validate the effectiveness of Lee Reynaldo's cash reward and structured interview programs. Specific Objectives: y Introduce a new organizational structure y Practice job rotation y Implement a new company wide standard procedure in employee hiring that would cover written exams, interviews etc y to provide customer service training to all employees of DrainFlow relative to their duties and responsibilities y to train order takers on the technical aspect of plumbing (additional know how would provide better and easier understanding of customer needs/problems y to formulate a new diagnostic questions that is suitable to customers with too little or too much knowledge on plumbing y to include after service call to all customers for feedback