Takeovers and mergers

The subject I’d like to speak is takeovers and mergers. All we know that a big company is always stronger than small one. But it’s well known fact that strong and big company wants to become stronger and bigger all the time to make itself more competitive. And there are some methods which can help strong company become stronger with another less strong and less competitive companies: takeover, merger and joint venture. The main causes and pluses of those actions are:

• if we takeover the company then we will own their resources, image, brand,- as a result we have economic benefit and international presence;

• also if we takeover the company then we will be able to take their role and place on the market and their clients,- as a result we get economic benefit and market share.

So, what must good manager do to make a takeover? First of all - it’s a well organized plan - there are 3 points: to set a goal, to evaluate the chosen target and to ensure that this company has all necessary resources to do that takeover or merger. And also one important moment is speed. If you want to make an acquisition than you have to act extremely quickly and to use the news leakages - it’s the main reason for success. For example, this strategy was used by Sony - when the electronic company Ericsson began having problems Sony used the situation and made a merger - and now all we know the company SonyEricsson.

So, but if we have made an acquisition we must not think that it is over and we can relax. No. We have to remember that we have already combined two different companies with two different organizations, two different corporate cultures, etc. We must give employees reasons why change is necessary, and find efficient ways of communicating. Also we have to decide where will our new headquarter be situated and other different stuff to organize new big and strong company very efficiently.

Customer service

The subject I’d like to speak on is customer service. Customer service is the main tool of organization, which is used for dealing with clients - so, those workers help us in the shops, we talk with them via the phone when we want to know some information, also we meet this people in the different social organizations like the zoo, subway, etc. Of course, customer service is a very important people in any firm - it is a face of organization - that’s why good managers have to pay a lot of attention on that item.

But sometimes customer service unfortunately plays a bad role - just like a fly in the honey. There are some things which irritate clients when they deal with customer service departments (or CSD):

• firstly - on the phone (being put on hold, speaking to a disinterested person and being cut off);

• secondly - face-to-face (unhelpful customer service personnel; too few staff at peak times; salespeople with poor product knowledge);

• thirdly - dealing with repairs and refunds department (delays on repairs, delays in getting money back).

So, the main question is what must good manager do to create a new effective customer service or to improve the efficiency of existing one? I’d like to make an example from practice of English trade department. The interesting system of making good customer service was represented by Retail Sales Director at Harrods - it is called “Seven Steps to exceptional Service” - I’ll not announce all the steps - I’ll tell you the main idea of that System. They are:

• firstly - attitude: members of customer service have to welcome visitors or clients at the beginning of the meeting, to ask the right questions to establish customers’ needs and to thank customers and invite them to return at the end of the meeting;

• secondly - professionalism: members of customer service have to use product knowledge to select items to satisfy customers’ needs, to highlight some benefits of products and to offer related products to maximize the service.

Of course, there are a lot of others methods of improving the efficiency of customer service - like supervising and testing and the choice of those methods depends on the specialization of the organization.