Essay Sample on BancRoyale: Outsourcing Customer Service to Reduce Costs Despite Language Barrier

Introduction

BancRoyale is a Dutch organization that has historically been based in the state capital, Amsterdam. The increasing cost of business has nonetheless made it difficult to run the company's activities from the Netherlands capital. The decision to outsource the customer service function seems to be a proper and reliable measure to minimize costs. Regardless, there is the issue that despite the professionalism of the customer service personnel in South America, there is a language barrier issue that many clients face. The company thus seeks to explore human resource solutions to deal with the language barrier concern and improve the delivery of services to its clientele. Dealing with the issue of the language barrier is quite a significant concern. The organization has to consider several hiring practices and incidentally worry about their customer representatives, and the issues they may have. BancRoyale has to ensure that given the circumstance of their outsourcing, they can get the best employees they can have.

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According to Collings, Wood, and Szamosi (2018), human resource concerns in an organization can be solved in a combination of ways. It is often critical to consider the options that would ensure the least cost to the organization and relatively have a minimum impact on the workforce and organizational structure. In the case of BancRoyale, it is possible to resolve the language barrier problem while ensuring that employees (who have shown professionalism) do not have to be let go. The most important aspect of solving human resource issues is to establish the root concern in the major problem (Afshan et al. 2018). Several factors could cause the language barrier. The first of these could be the inability to understand a new language or the lack of fluency in the second language. For many South Americans, Dutch may not be among their top 3 languages. Similarly, the call centers may have English, yet a good number of employees do not speak English as well. This essay evaluates human resource options and strategies that can aid BancRoyale to gain better customer service personnel in South America.

Key Human Resource Issues

Forming a Diversified Workforce

The first human resource strategy is to develop a diversified workforce that considers all issues of social distinction. The workforce should not only have diversified religions but also have persons who have different first language backgrounds. The first language could be English, Portuguese, Dutch or even Spanish. It is vital that the individuals working as members of the customer service call team be fluent in at least two languages, as to be assets especially in cases where the organization may receive clients from different linguistic groups, including Cantonese and other Asian minority language groups as well. The client's language is often a barrier to many organizations. It should be a significant effort by the organization to encourage clients to reach out in any language they are conversant with (Boon et al. 2018). Diversifying cultures and religions will likely diversify the languages as well.

A competent workforce presents a diversity of tolerance. Where Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Hindu religions work together, the nature and extent of religious tolerance can make the workplace better and ease tensions among employees and clients. Diversified cultures present differing blends of cultural etiquette that is important and often desirable in the workplace (Collings, Wood and Szamosi, 2018). Affirmative action is the best way to diversify the workforce in South America. While it may not be possible to transfer the Dutch culture practiced in Amsterdam fully, it is possible to create a new blend that practices respect, tolerance, and appreciation for all employees. Respect and admiration for the diversity of employees in terms of race, color, and religion can be an excellent motivator to the workforce (Lawler and Boudreau 2009). In the case of BancRoyale, it is crucial for the diversification to improve client relations, and an understanding of client needs from their culture's perspective.

Customer Service Training

Training is an aspect of human resource management that is important for any organization that seeks to continually improve in their delivery of services (McLean 2005). The practice has two elements to it. First, there are training requirements that can be considered the minimum entry-level requirements for an employee to be hired by an organization. These requirements are often tested during interviews and employee appraisals (Afshan et al. 2018). Training to meet minimum entry requirements is a prerogative of the employee and can continue even after the employee has been hired, at their own cost. The second nature of training occurs when the organization provides programs to improve skills and professional conduct among the employees. BancRoyale should offer training for the South American employees to enhance skills such as language accents and even increasing the number of languages the service professionals are fluent.

It is important to offer training regularly. Once the necessary employees have been hired, they can then be trained. Very high skilled employees need to be hired before being trained on the professional skills they need to have to meet organizational standards (Noe et al. 2017). Often, training is a requirement for companies that need to get international accreditation from organizations such as the International Standards Organization (ISO). The companies offering the practice, as well as the institutions tasked with this responsibility need to be recognized to a great extent as well, either locally, regionally or internationally to ascertain that the training offered is of standard quality (Boon et al. 2018). Training customer service representatives require international standards. These employees need to be tested and appraised on their skills constantly. It is by doing so that BancRoyale can improve the professionalism of the outsourced customer services department in South Africa.

Performance Appraisal

The performance of call center employees, as well as other officials involved in customer service assurance, is essential to the company. Performance appraisal is the technique in human resource management that ensures that the execution of deliverables in a contract of service is measured against the output of the employee in the organization (Suleman and Ogbette 2019). Performance appraisal is essential especially when BancRoyale puts in effort and resources to hire and motivate a diverse workforce. The company needs to know that the resources they are using are going to good use. Performance appraisal can take several forms or strategies. The first of these strategies is to have a periodical review of the company performance while evaluating the contribution of each employee as an individual. Many companies use annual reports to promote and increase salaries for employees as well (McLean 2005). Using the yearly strategy is however not feasible for BancRoyale.

The Dutch company needs to have periodic instant performance reports concerning employees. It is essential to engage employees using performance contracts to establish the progress of employee performance in a short period after employment. Performance contracts are essential tools of measurement that tell the employee what the organization needs them to achieve in terms of performance as well as the consequences that may befall them if they do not meet minimum performance requirements (Collings, Wood and Szamosi 2018). Call center employees ought to know that performance reviews do not only emanate from the management but the clients as well. Employees need to learn how to treat clients with etiquette as it does affect the management's view on their performance (Noe et al. 2017). It is critical to guarantee that the company can offer the clients the best experience possible.

Applying Performance Management Systems

Performance management systems help companies manage their resources to align them with the organization's growth perspectives. The resources an organization requires include; human resource, commonly referred to as employees, financial resources that generally constitute money, and material resources such as transportation means, communication and even assets such as buildings and warehouses (Lawler and Boudreau 2009). Performance management system determines resource sharing among different functions in the organization. A common approach to performance management is the auditing of resources, which is a regulatory requirement in many jurisdictions around the world. In human resource management, verification of the human resource function estimates the employees in an organization to determine the gap of over-use of the human resource (Noe et al. 2017). Similarly, many human resource evaluations determine the ideal number of employees needed, the working hours as well as the salary suitable for the employees.

According to Suleman and Ogbette (2019), performance management systems take into consideration six significant aspects of performance in an organization. The first of these issues is the strategy. Every organization has a set of goals that need to be met. It is thus vital to ensure that the performance management system devises the ideal approach to meet these sets of goals. The second aspect of performance management involves administration. It is vital to have the proper administrative measures that guarantee the appropriate promotions, demotions, and salary increments when required (Boon et al. 2018). Communication and development are essential performance management aspects as well. The system also needs to realize measures for organizational maintenance as well as documentation of feedback, among other issues affecting the organization. Records enable the organization to achieve past trends in performance and borrow from these strategies to improve future returns.

A performance management system that takes advantage of an information system and computer program has the six aspects of performance management incorporated into different modules in the organization (McLean 2005). BancRoyale can benefit from a computerized system that is then used by employees from the human resources department to evaluate different aspects of the organization and determine how best the organization can use existing resources to improve. A computerized performance management system needs to take into consideration the organizational models used by the organization to run its affairs (Lawler and Boudreau 2009). Managing human resource includes more aspects than just the employees. It is critical to properly use current finances to improve infrastructure where necessary to motivate the employee to work better. It is essential to have the human resource department aware of all critical issues regarding the customer services function, to continually improve the customer service experience offered by the organization.

Conclusion

Managing the human resources in BancRoyale's South American call center is vital to the customer service feedback the organization receives. The issue currently affecting the employees in the South American location of the company's customer service headquarters is the language barrier. The issue seems to be a human resource problem that affects the workforce currently working there. The organization may have hired without checking background knowledge on language skills as well as multilingualism. Human resource managers need to consider issues of diversity; to have persons with different language backgrounds come on board. Diversifying the workforce is in the interests of the...