Advantages And Disadvantages Of Mentorship

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

This report looks into the various methods such as hiring the right people, training, monitoring of calls and mentorship that can be used to improve customer satisfaction by reducing the number of escalated calls.

This report will focus on the advantages and disadvantages of using mentorship in the organization. Mentorship although can help to shorten the learning curve of new agents and help socialize them into the job and organization, there may be resistance of change from employees and shortage of suitable candidates to be mentors.

The effectiveness of the implementation of mentorship will have to be dependent on the outcome evaluation after the end of the mentorship process which is usually a period of 6 or 12 months.

And that a 1% improvement in first call resolution resulted in a 1% improvement in customer satisfaction. (Oracle, 2012)

In her research, Mori K (2007) found out that what customers most dislike was that their inquiries were transferred without given any answers on the first contact and customers have the tendency to rate such call centres with low satisfaction. Escalation means that customer’s issue on the first contact could not be solved and was transferred to a second line.

An escalation of call may be requested by customer or by the call centre agent. According to Impact Learning Systems (n.d), the reasons are often that customers realized that the agent does not have the authority or knowledge required to resolve issue or the customer has become angry and the prerequisite to calm the customer down is to speak to someone of higher authority. Hence, in order to improve customer satisfaction, call centre managers need to ensure that their agents are equipped with the knowledge and soft skills necessary to interact and resolve customers’ issue at first

By having “someone” to go to ask questions and discuss scenarios, mentees can learn the ropes much more quickly and not feel that they have nowhere to turn to for help. (Joseph C, n.d) Mentees are able to be more prepared to handle their work role and perform their work more competently with increased confidence they experienced as a result of being integrated fully into the role.

Mentorship also helps to create a culture of learning as it empowers learning in ways that training programs or manuals cannot achieve. Through individualized training during mentorship, it reduces the time require for knowledge transfer by providing direct access to a range of experts and peers who can share the required knowledge and skills in an environment that promotes rapid learning. (Chronus,