Students are Customer Service Team Managers within the Amazon Virtual Contact Center. Each team consists of up to four Team Leads as well as up to 40 virtual workers located across the United States. Customer Service Team Mangers report to a Customer Service Director located at Amazon’s corporate headquarters.
Within the last six months, your teams have experienced high rates of employee turnover. Nearly 25% of your team members have resigned, citing high stress and poor working conditions, including constant monitoring by management and pressure to receive perfect ratings for service excellence. At any given point in time, you have an average of 4-5 vacant positions on your team due to period turnover.
The Customer Service Director recently sent out a critical memo, noting a list of groups (including your team) with below average service scores. The memo indicates that each team’s performance over the next 90 days will determine whether it is “re-structured”. Last quarter, the Director took action to replace several of the lowest rated service teams with teams at offshore locations. The company currently uses foreign teams in a variety of places as part of its Virtual Contact Center.
To provide assistance in addressing your team’s issues, the Director assigns small groups pf team managers to work together to understand and resolve the current challenges within the next 90 days. Your teams are given a one-time budget of $10,000 for discretionary spending. To provide adequate staffing levels, the Director offers each team manager the option of adding one team lead and five temporary team members from one of the offshore locations in India, South Africa or the Philippines.
Process:
1. Read the articles provided discussing challenges related to work-life balance and stress at Amazon
2. Describe how you applied the creative problems solving approach to the current challenge.
3. Discuss the specific creative problem-solving techniques that you applied in this process (a minimum of three different creative techniques must be used)
4. Summarize the results of your analysis.
Creative problem-solving approach (p.199)
Techniques for Improving Problem Definition includes:
1. Make the familiar strange (for example, analogies and metaphors).
2. Elaborate on the definition (for example, question checklists and SCAMPER).
3. Reverse the definition (for example, Janusian thinking and opposition).
Techniques for Generating More Alternatives includes:
1. Deferring judgement (for example, brainstorming).
2. Expand current alternatives (for example, subdivision).
3. Combine unrelated attributes (for example, morphological synthesis and relational algorithm).
1. Read all articles that I uploaded firstly and carefully read the instruction.
2. You must include three creative problem solving techniques in the essay, the ebook provided having more detailed about creative problem solving techniques(p. 196-202). You can read it if you need more information.
4 You don’t need to write introduction and conclusion, only discuss the problem and summarize the outcomes based on creative approach.