Customer Service Excellence Report: PeoplePerHour Case Study, BUS541

This report provides a comprehensive analysis of customer service excellence within the gig economy, using PeoplePerHour as a case study. It begins with an introduction to the sector and its increasing demand, followed by an examination of customer service expectations for freelancers, including the importance of skills-based work, accurate payments, and quality. The report then details a training and development plan for new staff, emphasizing online training and its benefits. It explores organizational culture, vision, and mission, as well as a specific training strategy focused on soft skills for customer support agents. The report aligns customer service excellence with organizational culture and training strategies, outlining goals and a detailed training plan, including on-the-job training. The outcomes are measured through KPIs such as customer concern resolution and task deadline adherence. The report concludes by highlighting the crucial role of training and development in customer service excellence. References are provided to support the analysis.

Customer Service
Excellence

Introduction
 Customer service excellence in respect to gig economy and freelance
marketplace is providing sufficient amount of tasks to both freelancers
and self-employed people
 The lockdown state amid the coronavirus outbreak has increased the
demand for the industry as it provides an earning opportunity without
needing to go outside of home

The customer service expectations for the
sector
 Customer service expectations for freelancers will include offering skills-
based works in huge quantity, accurate payment of works and quality
works should be given the higher ratings and more projects

A training and development plan
for new members of staff
 Training and development
programs should be regularly
organised to bridge the gap
between service excellence and
a departmental activity
 Online training could be a better
option considering it being a
cost-effective approach and
easily implementable
 However, online training is
suitable only for a company that
has multiple branches located in
different parts of a country or the
world
 Online training allows an easy
collaboration with the people in
the different branches of a
company

1. Organisational culture
 The culture is to expand the network of self-employed people by
connecting with more people and providing them good projects
 The organisational culture is made of few essential elements such as
freedom, openness and change

2. Vision and mission

Vision
 The vision is to connect this business with their community of freelancers
who want to earn handsome income under flexible work structure

Mission
 Empowering people of worldwide countries by helping out to start a
business from the scratch
 Helping those who opt to become freelancers for their innumerous
reasons
 Helping freelancers and self-employed people become financially as well
as professionally independent

3. Training strategy
 Customer service support department was only being chosen for the
training purpose
 The purpose was to narrow down the discussion and make it more
specific to a department
 Customer support agents contribute strongly in attaining the overall
customer service excellence for a company through their many work
skills such as soft skills
 Hence, soft skills training for the backend customer support agents was
chosen for the discussion of training and development programs

4. Customer service excellence aligned with
organisational culture and training strategy
 The organisational culture and training strategy in place in
PeoplePerHour contributes to its customer service excellence
 One of the cultures is to keep changing to improve the service delivery
and meet emerging customer demands
 The company keeps its new hires updated on and aligned with
organisational values through proper knowledge on values and norms
such as through training and development programs.

5. Goals to achieve
The training and development for new staffs is aimed at making new hires familiar
with the organisational culture, values and norms

6. Plan (training and development for new
staff members)
The overall outcomes to achieve with this training and development
program would be to make new hires familiar with the tenured members in
the team, to communicate the management expectations with them, to
educate on tools to use to facilitate the job and communicate with the
team members, and to educate on their service responsibilities.

6.1 The type of training
“New Hires Customer Service Training”

6.2 The reason for this type of
training
In the freelance marketplace, it is important for customer support agents to
have strong negotiating and influencing skills to facilitate strong
professional relationships between the company and its community of
freelancers and self-employed people. Negotiating and influencing skills
help customer support agents in dealing a dispute case in a professionally
accepted manner, so that, the dispute case is resolved and the client
concern is also resolved.

6.3 Training delivery
The training delivery type will be the “On-the-Job-Training” aimed at riding
new hires with experienced customer support agents.

Measuring the outcomes of the training and
development at organisational level
On-the-job observation can be used to monitor the performance of new
hires The performance can be evaluated against a few key performance
indicators (KPIs) such as:
 Whether customer concerns are appropriately captured
 True commitment for task deadlines
 Providing correct and proper resolution on many queries like payment
enquiries

Conclusion
 The training and development programs are being made for the
customer support department in the PeoplePerHour Company as these
people have significant influence on the customer service excellence of
the company.

References
 Adeyi, A.O., Apansile, E.K., Okere, W. and Okafor, L.I., 2018. Training and Development and Organisational Performance: Standpoint
from Private Tertiary Institutions in Nigeria. Journal of Economics, Management and Trade, pp.1-10.
 Bell, B.S., Tannenbaum, S.I., Ford, J.K., Noe, R.A. and Kraiger, K., 2017. 100 years of training and development research: What we
know and where we should go. Journal of Applied Psychology, 102(3), p.305.
 Business Leader 2020. Huge Surge In Freelance Careers As Workers Seek New Jobs Amid Coronavirus Crisis | Business Leader
News. [online] Business Leader. Available at: <https://www.businessleader.co.uk/huge-surge-in-freelance-careers-as-workers-seek-
new-jobs-amid-coronavirus-crisis/81583/> [Accessed 8 April 2020].
 Cortado, F.J. and Chalmeta, R., 2016. Use of social networks as a CSR communication tool. Cogent business & management, 3(1),
p.1187783.
 Gu, G. and Zhu, F., 2018. Trust and disintermediation: Evidence from an online freelance marketplace. Harvard Business School
Technology & Operations Mgt. Unit Working Paper, (18-103).
 Martyn, E. and Anderson, C.K., 2018. Customer Satisfaction through Service Excellence: The Importance of Focused Training.
 Peopleperhour.com 2020. About Peopleperhour | Peopleperhour. [online] Peopleperhour.com. Available at:
<https://www.peopleperhour.com/about> [Accessed 8 April 2020].
 Peopleperhour.com 2020. About Peopleperhour | Peopleperhour. [online] Peopleperhour.com. Available at:
<https://www.peopleperhour.com/about> [Accessed 8 April 2020].
 Rahimi, R., 2017. Customer relationship management (people, process and technology) and organisational culture in
hotels. International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management.
 Raines, S.S., 2019. Conflict management for managers: Resolving workplace, client, and policy disputes. Rowman & Littlefield.