Effective Business Communication Case Study Analysis for MNC

This case study examines a multinational agricultural equipment company facing communication challenges, including ineffective social media usage and lack of client feedback mechanisms. The company, operating in multiple countries with a large customer base, struggles with internal communic...Read More

Running Head: Effective Business Communication
Effective Business Communication
Case Study Analysis

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Table of Content
Brief Introduction............................................................................................................................................ 2
Present Situation Analysis............................................................................................................................ 3
Issue 1: Ineffective usage of social media in the organization..................................................3
Issue 2: Client Feedback........................................................................................................................... 4
Conclusion........................................................................................................................................................... 5
Recommendation............................................................................................................................................. 6
Issue 1: Ineffective usage of Social media.......................................................................................... 6
Communication through Blogs.......................................................................................................... 6
Building community through Facebook........................................................................................ 8
Wiki as a channel of Information...................................................................................................... 9
Issue 2: Collecting and gaining Client Feedback.............................................................................9
Social Listening on the Digital Platforms.................................................................................... 10
Client Feedback through CRM......................................................................................................... 11
Company website as a platform..................................................................................................... 11
Feedback assessment and acknowledgment............................................................................. 12
References........................................................................................................................................................ 13

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Brief Introduction
A Multi-national company which is in the business of manufacturing and distributing
agricultural equipment to local and international clients employees over 8000
employees and caters to the demand of over 1 million customers world-wide. The
company has presence in Australia, Vietnam, India, Oman and Nigeria, typically the
countries whose income lies on the agricultural goods. In the recent times the company
is facing a couple of problems in the communication area. The problems as described by
the board are: Ineffective use of social media, blogs, wikis, social network to support the
teams to share ideas and knowledge, at the same time inability to collect customer
feedback and review on the quality of goods are the major communication challenges
faced by the company.
The underlying purpose of the report here is to analyse and conduct a literature review
on the issues and make recommendation on how to improve the existing situation along
with the parameters to evaluate the success or failure of the recommendation. The
report will highlight here plethora of strategies to make the best use of Social media and
the feedback in improving customer satisfaction and the quality of service provided by
the organization.

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Present Situation Analysis
In the present day, the company is facing troubles in managing communication in the
organization which is hampering the productivity and the efficiency of the organization
big time. The major issues at hand are:
Issue 1: Ineffective usage of social media in the organization
In a world, where social status is everything, it is really important to leverage the social
media platform at its full potential (Serrat, 2017). Communication is the heart and soul
of an organization, ineffective communication for a longer period of time in an
organization and bring down any company within a day, thus it becomes important to
understand the importance of social media as an effective tool of communication (Cook,
2017). Social media can be used to drive employee engagement, creating development
goals for the employees and empowering them by considering their views represented
on the social media. On a platform which is so vast, abundant and highly transparent, it
becomes absolutely numbing if the organization is unable to take leverage of the
platform (Tuten & Solomon, 2017).

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Social media platform serve as a great channel for bottom up communication which has
high importance in engaging and empowering the employees. Facebook and other social
media platforms have realized the importance of social network for businesses thus
have designed a separate platform catering to the businesses, the platform helps in
community building which then becomes a breeding ground of great ideas and a forum
for cogent discussion(Kasemasp, 2017). Thus, ineffective use of social media not only
just takes the company on a downward trajectory, but also hurts its productivity
severely (Raider & Krackhardt, 2017).
Issue 2: Client Feedback
Client feedback and review has been gaining popularity right from the evolution of the
business environment and the coherent understanding of the client importance to
businesses (Zald, 2017). Feedback of client is extremely helpful in knowing where the
company has been going wrong, what are the loopholes and areas of improvement
which the company can work upon to bring a change in customer experience (Sundet,
2017). In the absence of client feedback the organization stand alone with no clear cut
direction to move forward. They do not have a clear defined path or the areas of
improvement to work upon; this masks the growth of the company big time. However in
other case, when the clients’ feedback is being collected and assessed, the company
gains a lot (Paino & Jabar, 2017). The constructive feedback from the client helps in
assessing the gaps or lacunae in the business process or policies or the areas of
improvement in the existing product, which can help the company and customer thus
creating a situation of win-win (Kraut, 2017). Another big advantage of collecting client
feedback is the trust the company develops with the customers after comprehending on

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their concerns or grievances and working towards them. This ensures that the company
grows and ensures business momentum (Church & Waclawski, 2017). In the dynamic
business environment, where every industry is getting competitive it becomes
extremely important to listen to the client and comprehend the solution according, thus
building an everlasting relationship and embarking a journey of sustained
relationship(Chopra & Rajendran, 2017).Thus, in the present case, the organization has
no idea if it is doing good or bad for its customers, which in actual worsens the
condition of the organization and hampers its growth and productivity in the current
business ecosystem(Argyris, 2017).
Conclusion
The case study here is based on an MNC which manufactures and distributes
agricultural equipment. The company has a presence in 5 countries, viz, Australia,
Vietnam, India, Nigeria and Oman, serving over 1 million customers worldwide. In the
recent past the company has been facing quite a trouble in managing its communication
and challenges in collecting and assessing client feedback for the continuous
improvement in the business practices and product offering.
One of the biggest challenges the company has been facing is ineffective usage of social
media platforms like Facebook, Wiki, Web blogs and other such channels to engage its
employees, initiate a conversation or collating their views about the company business
operation and process. This has been hampering the company severely as social media
is one platform which is transparent and ensures effective communication between the
company and its employees. The ineffectiveness to leverage the platform is breaking the
motivation of the team and putting constraint on the continuous learning, growth and
development within the organization.
Another major challenge at hand, which by all means is one of the biggest obstacles
towards the goal of business momentum, is the inability to collect and assess the
customer feedback and grievances. In absence of the client feedback the company
becomes totally clueless about its future vision, goals and objectives. The company gets
a perception that no feedback is good feedback and they keep on doing what they have
been doing, which hampers the organization drastically. They are unable to innovate,

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make changes in their product line, which leaves them far behind in the competitive
industry. Thus, it is really important to address these issues first hand, and prevent the
company from falling into the trap of downward trajectory.
Recommendation
Issue 1: Ineffective usage of Social media
According to the case study, the organization’s inability to effectively use social media as
a channel of effective communication is posing big challenges in managing its internal
communication with its employees and also unable to help them with task management.
Communication through Blogs
Communication plays a very important role in any business organization, not only it is
effective in conveying the message but at the same time it can also be used as a tool to
engage with the employee, which further helps in improving his productivity thus
reducing employee turnover within the organization(Schein, 2017)
Blogs are an excellent medium to communicate with the employees. Blogs can be used
in plethora of different ways to increase the engagement, sharing quality information,
communicate with the target group and skill enlargement (Farmer, 2017). Human
resource can effectively use this channel to consistently post updates on the new
policies for the employees, or to post any new information with relevant content. This
information thus reaches the employees quickly, and the comprehensiveness of the
platform helps in easy understanding of the conveyed points. Blogs can also be used as

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an effective tool to conduct Q&A session with the employees; this Q&A will help in
building engagement with the employees and also help the organization in knowing
certain areas of improvement about the organization. The company can also use blogs
to convey new trends in the industry, or new tools which the employees can use to work
effectively with enhanced productivity (Decker & Lacy, 2017).
Besides this, Blogs are an excellent medium to promote learning and development
within the organization and also to motivate the employees. Example being, Senior
managers or leaders who have been working in the industry or the company for too
long can share their views and insight on how to handle a client, or his success story or
how he tackled a challenge, or his learning of the industry. This information can be
extremely useful for people who have just joined the organization and are highly
uncertain of the growth and other such things. Further, the usage of blogs can also be
encouraged in the organization by asking employees to post blogs to educate their peer,
colleague or even convey a thing or two to the senior managers. This will also help in
bring a sense of pride in the employee who has been writing blog and would also propel
other employees to share their thoughts, views, ideas or any other useful information.
Thus, Blogs are extremely effective tool of communication offered by the technology
pertaining to Web 2.0(Leonardi & Vaast, 2017).
It is the monitoring and evaluation of the Web 2.0 tools which makes it an inevitable
platform. The success or failure can be measured by the number of people reading the
blogs, follower count, reviews, sharing or any other form of engagement with the shared
content. Yammer, Jibe and connections can be used as social media tool for micro –
blogging (Kane, 2017). Another way of pushing the Blog culture is to link it with the
KRA (Key rating area of the employee).

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Building community through Facebook
Facebook has been divulging a lot of money towards improving its Facebook for
business division to make it a useful platform for the employees. Facebook can be easily
used as an effective social media platform for employees by building strong
communities of employees who can then work together to create a collaborative
environment. Facebook can also be used as an effective platform to convey any
important or urgent information to large group of people at one time, the easy
accessibility to the platform and its employee friendly design makes the communication
easily consumable(Quirke, 2017). Further, the company can build small group or teams
through the platform and send highly targeted messages to one group at the go.
Facebook as a platform can also be used to make any organizations content viral on the
platform, also when there are teams working in different countries, Facebook helps in
sharing the same information with all of them at the same time. Thus, beside the point
of community building, the platform also has usage in high content targeting, creating
collaborative group and projects for people and communicating a message over a short
period of time to the employees. The easy accessibility, designing, user interface makes
the platform highly relevant to the organization (Cornelissen & Cornelissen, 2017).

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Wiki as a channel of Information
Wikipedia has been in vogue since the early 2000, when it was launched. It is an
excellent platform to fill in the information on a particular topic, project, industry,
company or any other field of interest. These wikis can be used to train and make the
employees learn some important concept during their induction or training. Wikis serve
as a platform for learning and development of the employees. It is also advised to keep
the language and structure simple on the Wikipedia page to make the employee
understand the content in an effective manner. Thus, Wiki serve as a good source for
facilitating knowledge to a large group of employees in the organization, also with the
option of adding more relevant information, thus expanding the horizon of learning and
growth (Zhang, Guo, Hu & Liu, 2017).
Issue 2: Collecting and gaining Client Feedback
Client feedback is extremely important for any organization; inability to collect and
assess the client feedback hampers the organization severely. Some of the strategies are
suggested to collect the employee feedback and use it to its optimum utilization:

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Social Listening on the Digital Platforms
Social media has a reach of around 3.75 billion people worldwide, which makes it a
highly effusive channel. The company is advised to be really active on social media and
conduct social media monitoring at all times(Kim, Choi & Verma, 2017) A dedicated
team’s job will only be to listen to what the customers are talking about their company.
In the case, when the feedback received is good, thank the customer and give him an
assurance of the same quality and standards in the product. In the case, where the client
feedback is bad, comprehend his concern, appreciate him for lending valuable time to
speak about the company for its development and address is concern then and there
and convert him into a loyal customers by addressing his grievances(Moreira, 2017)
Thus, social listening will the company in building relationship with the customers and
also to ensure that the company is working on the lacunae in their product and services,
leading to an environment of sustained innovation and improvement.

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Client Feedback through CRM
Undoubtedly one of the most effective channel to collect, assess the feedback and use it
for improvement in the company products and services. It is the responsibility of the
organization to engage with the clients and collect feedback from them with the use of
questionnaire, social media, email or event Face to face meetings (Al-Weshah, 2017).
The data can then be feed into the CRM which can be used as a base to tackle the
challenge at hand. The information will also help the organization in removing the
obstacle once for all and thus preventing any further problem due to the same reason.
The company has to create a dedicated CRM team whose only purpose is to collect the
feedback, build relationship with the customers. Solve his query or concern and create a
database of such problems to use it as a base while creating future business strategies
(Chen, Lu, Tu, 2017).
Company website as a platform
An angry or an irate customer first comes to the company website to report the
incident, his concern or any other problem. If at the very same instance he is given a
resolution, the company is saved from getting a tarnished image on the social media
channels (Winston, 2017). Thus, it is very important to have a dedicated team of 24*7
which is active on the company’s website to listen to the problem of customer and solve
his query. A First call resolution or FCR has to be the KRA of such customer support
team. The feedback can thus be shared with the management and the relevant teams

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handing the particular product line or service for bridging the gap between the
customer expectation and product offering (Sampson & Spring, 2012).
Feedback assessment and acknowledgment
It is not necessary that every Feedback the company gets is bad, there is a paradigm
shift in the reasons why customers gives feedback to the companies. They want the
company to learn, to grow, and help them to design products which can better suit the
needs of the customers, this is called as constructive feedback and is very important for
the organization. In cases, where the customer is appreciating the company, request
him to write a testimonial on the company’s website to build positive brand advocacy
and a sustained relationship with the client. In any of the case, the important point is
“ACKNOWLEDGEMENT”, organization has to ensure that it acknowledges each and
every feedback it receives from the client and takes it in a positive manner. Convey him
the required plan of Action on the issue resolution along with the time frame required
to solve the issue. This will go a long way in building trust, transparency and a long term
relationship with the clients.

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Argyris, C. (2017). Integrating the Individual and the Organization. Routledge.
Chen, L., Lu, M., & Tu, Y. (2017). After Auction's Complete: What Will Buyers Do Next?-A
Case Study of Feedback Rating at eBay. International Journal of E-Business Research
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Kasemsap, K. (2017). Professional and business applications of social media platforms.
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