LOW PERFORMING CUSTOMER SERVICE STAFF IN LAZMALL CHANNEL OF LAZADA VIETNAM MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY
International School of Business
------------------------------

HO HOANG VIET LINH

LOW PERFORMING CUSTOMER
SERVICE STAFF IN LAZMALL
CHANNEL OF LAZADA VIETNAM

MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2020

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UNIVERSITY OF ECONOMICS HO CHI MINH CITY
International School of Business
------------------------------

HO HOANG VIET LINH

LOW PERFORMING CUSTOMER
SERVICE STAFF IN LAZMALL
CHANNEL OF LAZADA VIETNAM

MASTER OF BUSINESS ADMINISTRATION

SUPERVISOR: Assoc.Prof.Dr. NGUYEN THI MAI TRANG

Ho Chi Minh City – Year 2020

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Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT .............................................................................................. 3
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY ............................................................................................ 4
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS: ........................................................................................ 5
LIST OF TABLES .......................................................................................................... 6
LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................ 6
1.

Company background ............................................................................................. 8

2.

Symptoms ............................................................................................................. 11

3.

Problem identification ........................................................................................... 15
3.1. Potential problems ........................................................................................... 16
3.1.1.

The first possible problem: Low performing Customer Service staff .. 17

3.1.2.

The second possible problem: Complicated process ............................ 23

3.1.3.
The third possible problem: Competitive market with increase in
customer demand .................................................................................................. 25
3.1.4.

Bad experience with product quality and delivery service ................... 28

3.2. Problem validation .......................................................................................... 32
3.2.1. Eliminating complicated process as main problem .................................... 32
3.2.2. Eliminating competitive market with increase in customer demand as main
problem ................................................................................................................. 32
3.2.3. Eliminating Bad experience with Product quality and Delivery service as
main problem ........................................................................................................ 33
3.2.4. Identify Low performing CS staff as the main problem ............................. 35
4.

Justify the importance of Low performing CS staff ............................................. 35

5.

Potential causes ..................................................................................................... 38
5.1. Potential cause 1: Stress at work ..................................................................... 38
5.1.1.

Potential sub-cause 1: Lack of headcount due to wrong forecast ......... 38

5.1.2.

Potential sub-cause 2: Too much distracting noise ............................... 40

5.2. Potential cause 2: Poor work engagement....................................................... 41
5.2.1.

Potential sub-cause 1: Lack of bonding in team ................................... 42

5.2.2.

Potential sub-cause 2: Unpleasant task ................................................. 44
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5.2.3.

Potential sub-cause 3: Limited praise and recognition ......................... 45

5.3. Potential cause 3: Robotic staff ....................................................................... 46
5.3.1.

Potential sub-cause 1: Lack of soft skill agent ...................................... 46

5.3.2.

Potential sub-cause 2: Limited learning and development opportunity 48

5.4. Cause validation .............................................................................................. 49
6.

Alternative Solutions ............................................................................................ 51
6.1. Alternative solution 1: Design a set of team building activities ..................... 52
6.2. Alternative solution 2: Organize a buddy program ......................................... 54
6.3. Alternative solution 3: Change in appraisal scheme to motivate agents ......... 56
6.4. Solution justification ....................................................................................... 58

7.

Change plan design ............................................................................................... 60
7.1. Objectives ........................................................................................................ 60
7.2. Expected outcomes .......................................................................................... 60
7.3. Plan implementation ........................................................................................ 61

8.

Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 66

9.

Supporting information ......................................................................................... 66
9.1. Methodology: .................................................................................................. 66
9.2. Interview guide .................................................................................................. 66
9.3. Transcript ........................................................................................................... 69

REFERENCES ............................................................................................................. 83

APPENDIX ................................................................................................................... 89

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
First of all, I would like to deliver my gratitude to ISB for giving me such valuable
opportunity to apply all knowledge I have learned during my master of business
administration course. I have been inspired a lot by enthusiastic and experienced professors
and lecturers during my academic years.
Specifically, I would like to sincerely thank my thesis supervisor - Assoc.Prof.Dr. Nguyen
Thi Mai Trang for her careful and clear guidance. I cannot have completed this thesis without
her advice and support. She is the one who is delivering me the very first knowledge about
problem solving in organization with all her passion.
In addition, I would like to express my appreciation to all people who have co-operated very
well with me for my in-depth interviews and are very willing to spend their precious time to
share valuable information for me to add in my thesis.
Last but not least, I want to show my grateful attitude to my family members for the sympathy
as they are always stand by me during my master thesis period.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Customer satisfaction is a term that many companies are trying to achieve in this modern
economy, as customer is the base for any enterprise to survive. However, in recent report of

Lazada, Lazmall team has been achieved lower customer satisfaction than target, which goes
against expectation of the management team in the company. Lazmall team has been founded
in 2018 with the purpose to bring out the extraordinary experience for customers who buy
authorized products on this platform.
Therefore, in-depth interviews were conducted and data were collected to analysis the
situation of Lazmall team. With the strong support of literature, the research comes up with
some potential problems: Low performing customer service staff, complicated process,
competitive market with increase in customer demand and bad experience with product and
delivery service. After validation, the main problem as low performing customer service staff
has been revealed. Further analyzing, the research shows some potential causes for the main
problems, which are: Stress at work, no work engagement and robotic staff.
After that, the main cause was identified as lack of work engagement, and some alternative
solutions for the main cause were designed. The best solution to solve the main cause has
been chosen basing on its feasibility and the adaption with company‘s situation.
In a word, the thesis investigate the central problem in Lazmall team of Lazada, the main
cause of that problem and the proposed solution, in order to improve the customer satisfaction
score in Lazmall channel.

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS:
CS: Customer service
CSAT: Customer satisfaction
DSAT: Dissatisfaction
KPI: Key Performance Indicator
SLA: Service Level Agreement
Backlog: Ticket of customer that is not resolved within SLA

NPS: Net Promoter Score
SKU: Stock keeping unit
SOP: Standard operation process

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LIST OF TABLES
Table 1

CSAT monthly of Lazada in 2019

Table 2

Ticket related to process of Lazmall in 2019

Table 3

E-commerce usage habit in Vietnam

Table 4

Order beyond promised date divided by delivery method

Table 5

Problem with Lazmall products received in 2019

Table 6

Call productivity of agents in campaign 11.11.2019

Table 7

Employee satisfaction toward company‘s physical working environment

Table 8

Employee satisfaction of Lazada in 2019

Table 9

Quality scorecard result divided by criteria

Table 10

Educational background of customer service employees in Lazada

Table 11

Years of experience in same industry prior to Lazada

Table 12

Cost for alternative solution 1

Table 13

Cost for alternative solution 2

Table 14

Cost for alternative solution 3

Table 15

Cost for selected solution

Table 16

Action plan implementation

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1

Company structure of Lazada – Dec 2019

Figure 2

Lazmall customers by age – 2019

Figure 3

Lazmall customers by gender – 2019

Figure 4

Lazada customers‘ income by channel

Figure 5

Lazada Customer service structure

Figure 6

Lazmall CSAT and DSAT monthly

Figure 7

CSAT Lazmall break down by agent‘s tenure

Figure 8

Lazmall functional structure

Figure 9

Lazmall DSAT root cause

Figure 10

Potential problem diagram

Figure 11

Lazada CS monthly quality score 2019

Figure 12

Quality score by tenure of Lazmall agent

Figure 13

Lazada monthly backlog per headcount 2019

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Figure 14

Lazmall DSAT deep dive

Figure 15

CS mistake contribution to DSAT in 2019

Figure 16

Process of handling transaction

Figure 17

Traffic of users in Vietnamese Ecommerce

Figure 18

Criteria cared by customer during shopping

Figure 19

DSAT counts by contact reason

Figure 20

Shipping and delivery issues contribution in Lazmall

Figure 21

Net promotion score between Ecommerce site

Figure 22

Potential causes

Figure 23

Process of transaction handling in Lazada

Figure 24

Updated cause effect map

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1. Company background
Founded in 2012, Lazada Vietnam is a part of Lazada group – a Southeast Asia‘s leading Ecommerce platform presenting in six countries. Lazada Group is majority owned by Alibaba
Group Holding Limited.
Lazada Vietnam is one of the pioneers in E-commerce industry, with its vision is to change
Vietnamese consumer behavior, from traditional market to an online platform. On that
platform, sellers can provide products from various categories like: Fashion and accessories,
Health and Beauty, Groceries, Electronic products, Sport and toys, while shoppers can easily
look for a product they want. In a word, Lazada‘s mission is to deliver an ―Effortless
shopping experience‖ to buyers, by offering them a huge marketplace whereby they can
approach online to millions of products from thousands of sellers. Focused on delivering an
excellent customer experience, Lazada Vietnam offers multiple payment methods including
cash-on-delivery, comprehensive customer care and hassle-free returns through its own firstand last-mile delivery arm supported by different logistics partners.
Organizational structure:
James Dong is the Chief Executive Officer of Lazada Vietnam and Lazada Thailand. James
joined Lazada in June 2018 as the CEO of Lazada Thailand and was appointed CEO of
Lazada Vietnam one year later, in addition to his existing role. Prior to joining Lazada, he was
the Head of Alibaba Group Globalization Corporate Development and Business Assistant to
Group Chief Executive Officer, Daniel Zhang. Under the CEO, there are six different
departments, of which Customer Service belong to Customer care department.

Figure 1: Company structure of Lazada – Dec 2019 (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019)

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LazMall
Launched on the Lazada platform in August 2018, LazMall connects shoppers to over 1,500

leading authorized brand distributors. Lazmall is the flagship stores of Lazada, with the
mission is to provide genuine and trusted along with reliable service and quality assurance. It
is to say that Lazmall is a virtual mall, which allows Lazada to set a new higher standard in
retail. Shoppers can check out with the assurance of 100% authenticity, 15-day hassle-free
returns, and next-day delivery. All Lazmall products are distributed by the top famous brand
like Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi, Laneige, Vichy, Za, Huggies, Pamper, Moony. For brands and
sellers, LazMall offers an opportunity to create a customized experience for their customers.
Lazada, hence, decided to build a special team to take care of consumers for this mall, called
Lazmall customer service agent (Lazmall CS). The requirements for those agents to be
recruited to this channel is very high, in order to deliver the wow experience for customers. It
has been a big honor for those employees who were chosen to serve customers in this special
channel.
According to an internal survey of Lazada Customer Care, Lazmall buyers‘ background is
illustrated in the following figure:
First of all, the customers‘ age in 2019 is shown below:

Figure 2: Lazmall customers by age – 2019 (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019)

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According to Figure 2, the participants who are from 25 to 35 years old accounted for the
greatest portion with 41%, and the second majority are group between 36 to 45 years old.
Meanwhile, the group of under 25 and over 45 account for the smallest part, which are at 16%
and 13% respectively.
Below is the gender structure of the customer database in 2019:

Figure 3: Lazmall customers by gender – 2019 (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019)

For online shopping on Lazada, it is witnessed that women and men population account for
almost equal part, which are 55% and 45% respectively. However, the proportion of female
buyers is still higher than the percentage of male consumers in general.
Next is the monthly income structure of purchasers on Lazmall compared to non-Lazmall
channel in 2019:

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Figure 4: Lazada customers‟ income by channel (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019)
At a glance, figure 4 shows that Lazmall customers have the major population (35%) with
income varies between 16-20 million VND, while non-Lazmall customers‘ monthly income
mostly under 15 million VND (33% at 10-15 million dong and 31% under 10 million dong).
It is obvious that Lazmall customers‘ earnings tend to be higher than non-Lazmall‘s.
2. Symptoms
In recent months, from October 2019, it is observed that Lazmall channel have the lowest
customer satisfaction score (CSAT) among other channels, and the score seems to decrease by
time and even under target. For lots of enterprises, controlling customer dissatisfaction
(DSAT) is extremely essential to maintain a stable and profitable growth. (1) In the condition
of growing markets and under intense competitive pressures, many companies are spending
their efforts on retaining a loyal customer base. Loyal consumers help on saving to service,
are willing to spend more their time and money with the service & products, and open up a
potential source for further business opportunities (1).
The below graph the target set by Customer care department for the customer satisfaction
score (CSAT). This target is set by regional Lazada team, all over six countries where Lazada
is operated in, basing on the average CSAT score of history.

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Figure 5: Lazada Customer service structure (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019)
Total CSAT
The formula to measure CSAT is: % CSAT =

Total CSAT + DSAT

The way Lazada calculate the score of CSAT is through customer response after they are
being served by Customer service team. For every issue raised by customers, agent will create
a ticket on system, after the ticket is resolved, system will automatically sent out a survey to
get feedback from customers, whether they are satisfied with the solutions provided or not.
Eight in-depth interviews with key persons of Lazada Customer service department, the
Lazmall CS agent and Lazmall customers have been conducted to find out the possible
problems. Mr. Thien - Customer Service manager also provided his idea that:
„CSAT score of Lazmall team has been a crisis in the last quarter of 2019 that draws
concern from not only Lazada Vietnam‟s CEO but also the regional management team.
This reflects the fact that all the customers‟ attitude toward Lazmall team has been gone
against our expectation of giving customers a better online shopping experience‟ (Pham
Hoang Thien, Customer Service manager, 38 years old).
Mr. Thien raised a big concern about the drop in CSAT score of Lazmall and emphasized that
this problem brings a lot of attention from management team with the purpose of driving
Lazmall team to the right track.
The CSAT score record is reflected in the table below:

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Table 1: CSAT monthly of Lazada in 2019
Channel

Unit: %

Target Jun-19 Jul-19 Aug-19 Sep-19 Oct-19 Nov-19 Dec-19

CS non-Lazmall

88

89,60

89,28

90,98

90.54

90,94

89,94

90,83

CS Lazmall

90

91,55

91.65

91.13

90,85

88,89

88.69

88,76

(Source: Internal Lazada report 2019)
The CSAT score of CS non-Lazmall has been always above target, while the figure for CS
Lazmall was unstable and became under target in the last quarter of 2019. Prior October 2019,
the percentage of customer satisfied with Lazmall varied around 91% of survey respondents.
Nevertheless, right after that, the score declined to 88.89% and stayed lower than 90% in the
whole quarter. This is a threat to Lazada Vietnam, as Lazmall CS team was built with the
purpose to provide customer exclusive experience at the first priority compared to others
products channel. In three continuous months, the CSAT score for Lazmall CS was even
lower than non-Lazmall agents, by up to 2% in the month of December.
According to the sharing from Ms. Tu – Team leader of Lazmall:
„The CSAT of Lazmall team had been always retained over target of 90% since the first
day we started. However, recently, that number becomes the most serious concern for all
of us. There are too many customers raise DSAT every day that it becomes more difficult
for us to increase the overall score.‟ (Nguyen Thi Cam Tu, Lazmall Team leader, 29 years
old)

As mentioned by Ms. Tu, the CSAT score of Lazmall decreases in recent time and she
claimed for the accretion of DSAT number raised by customers. The trend of CSAT/DSAT
number among channels is shown in Figure 6:

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Figure 6: Lazmall CSAT and DSAT monthly (source: Internal Lazada report 2019)
Have a glance at the DSAT number in green has the fluctuated trend in the first half of 2019
and the number always stayed smaller than 40 during this period. Meanwhile, in the second
half, it observed the common trend of DSAT count, which was increase from 46 in July to 85
in December. Consequently, the %CSAT score also dropped from 91.65% to 88.76% in same
period, which can prove for what Ms. Tu was sharing.
The CSAT score broken down by tenure of Lazmall agents is shown in below figure:

Target

Figure 7: CSAT Lazmall break down by agent‟s tenure (source: Internal Lazada report 2019)

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Figure 7 shows that, the group of agents under three months of experience in Lazmall are
always under target of CSAT, and this group is also the most fluctuated in CSAT score over
the year.
Functional structure of CS Lazmall:

Figure 8: Lazmall functional structure (Source: Internal Lazada report 2019)
Within Lazmall customer service team, there are three main departments, which are Training,
Quality assurance (QA) and Operation department. Training team is responsible for
onboarding and qualifying new CS agent, while QA team‘s duty is to make sure agents
perform well in quality metric. Operation team is in charge of productivity, CSAT score and
headcount arrangement, to maintain the service level of Lazmall channel.
3. Problem identification
With the DSAT data analysis collected from Quality team, ones can observe the factors
leading to the decision of raising a DSAT from customer in below figure:

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Figure 9: Lazmall DSAT root-cause (source: Internal Lazada report 2019)
According to Figure 9, four main internal factors that are considered to bring the major impact
to customer dissatisfaction in Lazmall team are: logistics (30.3%), process (24.24%), CS staff
mistake (20.45%) and product (19.7%)
3.1. Potential problems
Through in-depth interview with key people in the company, the initial cause-effect map is
found with some potential problems for low customer satisfaction of Lazmall CS team:

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Figure 10: Potential problem diagram (source: Author synthesis)

Three symptoms were found including: the number of customers‘ complain increases, more
tickets are reopen because customers disagree with resolution of Lazmall CS agent and the
decrease of customer satisfaction score. Problems leading to the inflation of customer
complaints are competitive market with increase in customer demand and the bad experience
of buyers with Lazmall product quality and delivery service. Besides, the problems lead to
more reopen tickets are complicated process of Lazmall and low performing Customer service
staff.
3.1.1. The first possible problem: Low performing Customer Service staff
In the interview with Mr. Khoa – Head of Customer care department, he stated that at the first
stage, Lazmall team was built to represent for the whole Lazada and to increase the
experience for Lazada customer.
„This was our baby project for a long time and so far, Lazmall remains our first concern
for any of our decision. We would like to build a strong and effective Lazmall team, in
order to pull up the experience for Lazada buyers, by providing them a special care that
they have never got before.‟ (Tran Dang Khoa, Head of customer care of Lazada, 35 years
old)

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It was proven by prior research that customer service has positive impact in increasing
customer satisfaction, from there the purchase intentions is developed through word-of-mouth
recommendations (2). In customer service, the employees play the main role to define the
success in terms of bringing customer‘s experience. There exists an interdependence between
customers and service employees and the activities or behaviors of one could mutually impact
those of the other. (3)
At the beginning of the Lazmall project, Mr. Khoa will directly interview in the final round to
pick up every CS agent who had enough skills and experience. It was such a big honor for the

selected agents to work in Lazmall. In addition to that, they were undergone an additional indepth soft-skill training to be able to handle tough complain. However, after more than a year
of running project, the tittle Lazmall CS is no longer fancy in agents‘ mind as it used to be.
„I was forced to join Lazmall CS team. I used to work in non-Lazmall team, and I was quite
comfortable with that. However, since I was picked to Lazmall, my performance tends to
decrease.‟ (Duong Thi Suong, Lazmall CS, 22 years old)
According to the sharing from agents, recently, there was no interviewed conducted to select
CS for Lazmall team and they were picked up from other channels. More importantly, some
of them were forced to move to Lazmall rather than being willing to join. This is because of
the fact that, there is a rule Lazada has set up for this team that Lazmall agents should be top
performing CS. In case the agents no more perform well, he will be removed and replaced by
other CS from non-Lazmall team. However, the overall KPI of the team continues to drop
down with the above strategy. Mr. Thien said that:
„The KPI of Lazmall team is a crisis problem in these months, while all the numbers of
transaction quality, response speed are falling, and the number of backlogs increases more
and more. This is unacceptable due to the fact that we have selected the best performed
agent to work here‟. (Pham Hoang Thien, Customer Service manager of Lazada, 38 years
old)
In Lazada, each CS agent is evaluated by monthly KPI scores, including:
- Response speed: counted by the percentage of transaction in which CS can first
response customer within 30 seconds.
- Transaction quality, measured by a scorecard monitored by quality assurance specialists
- Backlog (ticket which is not resolved within 48hours)

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It is observed that from second half of 2019, those KPI scores of those criteria have been
fluctuated and even gone below target:

Figure 11: Lazada CS monthly quality score 2019 (source: Internal Lazada report 2019)
The quality score break down by different group of is illustrated in below figure:

Figure 12: Quality score by tenure of Lazmall agent (source: Internal Lazada report 2019)
It is observed that tenured agents have stable quality score in all calls, while new joins‘
quality usually fluctuates. The quality is mostly decided by how well each agent provides
appropriate solution for customers, basing on the process of Lazada. All newbies of Lazmall
were recruited from non-Lazmall channel and the selected candidates must have excellent

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performance previously. However, when coming to Lazmall, their quality performance seems
down significantly.

Figure 13: Lazada monthly backlog per headcount (source: Internal Lazada report 2019)
Figure 11 and 13 showed that, quality scores of agents in Lazmall team are lower than nonLazmall one over most the months in 2019, while the backlog per agent is higher. This
indicates that, both quality and productivity of Lazmall team are not as good as target of
Lazada.
More importantly, from the observation of Quality team, the DSAT made by CS mistake has
the increasing trend in Lazmall department throughout the last quarter of 2019, while the
figure for non-Lazmall agent remain unchanged:

Figure 14: Lazmall DSAT deep dive (source: Internal Lazada report 2019)

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In previous part, from the income data, ones can see that Lazmall customers are usually of
premium level and they were promised by Lazada to be served in a special channel, at
premium class. However, according to a sharing from– Lazmall customers, there is no much
difference between the Lazmall and non-Lazmall CS agent in terms of handling customer
complain.
„Lazada advertises a lot of benefit for customers buying Lazmall products, however, when I
have problem with the item received, the way that a Lazmall CS handle my issue is similar
to the time I bought a normal product and contacted to non-Lazmall agents. I did not see
any special priority regarding the post-purchase support here‟ (Ms. Hoang Minh Anh,
customer of Lazmall, 30 years old)
From what Ms. Minh Anh said, there is no different in the way a Lazmall and non-Lazmall
agent handle the call from customers. Meanwhile, in the term and condition of Lazada,
customers were promised to enjoy a specific service ever, which is a trade-off for them to buy
Lazmall – more expensive products on Lazada. This is the most disappointing part because
Lazada is not delivering what buyers desire.
CS Lazmall staff is the only ones directly dealing with customers and in other word, they are
the representative for Lazmall brand image in clients‘ eye. Customer services staff plays a
vital role in building customer‘ interest for a particular service provider (4). One of the critical
factors that lead to the customer satisfaction when using a service provider is employee
behavior, comprises of friendliness, responsiveness and the promptness of the employee.
The data Lazmall DSAT root-cause showed that customer service staff mistakes accounted
for 20.45 percent of total factors that lead to dissatisfaction among consumers. That number
tended to increase month over month The CS mistakes include: lack of communication skill,
courtesy, knowledge and transaction handling skill. Bellow figure shows the CS mistake
contribution in total DSAT in 2019, data annalyzed by Quality team.

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Figure 15: CS mistake contribution to DSAT in 2019 (source: Internal Lazada report 2019)
As cited by Wu (5), Arthur and Bennett emphasized that customer service agents who own
good communication skill including listening well to others and expressing their ideas clearly
could result in a better understanding of customers‘ demands and help to build a trustworthy
relationship with them. Communication mistake is counted when a CS agent does not show
empathy to customers, ignore customers‘ questions or concern and answer them in a robotic
way. According to Wieseke et al. as cited by Bahadur et al. (6), empathy is illustrated as ―a
person‘s ability to sense another‘s thoughts, feelings, and experiences, to share other‘s
emotional experience, and to react to the observed experiences of another person‖. It has an
important role in customer service that in Lazada, especially Lazmall, empathizing becomes a
mandatory requirement for any CS agent. This is because of the fact that empathy is a
powerful tool for adequate human intercommunication and in the service industry and a key
factor for successful interactions between clients and frontline employees (7). Customers can
feel that they are understood, from there turning into positive emotions and attitude toward the
service brand (6).
Courtesy mistake is when the agents show bad attitude with customers, and for this fault,
those will be terminated right away. Listeners could be able to sense the inadequate manner of
CS employees through their tone of voice, words use and the rhythm of response. For
example, the staff who intensely argue with customers, intentionally leave a long dead air to
avoid answering queries, or jumping into clients‘ mouth while they are talking. According to
Bienstock et al. as cited by Beatson et al. (8), the serving behaviors and attitudes of frontline employees are essential for the positive reaction of services by clients.

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Lack of knowledge and transaction handling skill means the agents does not meet target
quality to handle a standard call or chat received from buyers. With this weakness, the CS
staff can provide wrong information and wrong resolution for customers or they escalate to
inappropriate departments, which leads to longer waiting time. Those mistakes are frequently
checked by quality specialists and it was recorded that mistake by lack of knowledge
accounted for 27.85% and 15.07% of agents are short of transaction handling skill. As cited
by Wu et al., Boshoff and Allen stated that (5) employees who lack the required workplace
competencies may fail to meet customers' needs or provide satisfactory service quality. This is
because when an employee deliver the agreed service dependably and accurately, the
consumers more likely to believe that the enterprises possess high-quality service, and thereby
perceive better satisfaction to the service (5).
3.1.2. The second possible problem: Complicated process
First to mention is the call- transfer process for Lazmall. When customers contact to CS
agents to raise specific issues, all their need is to have a quick answer straight to the point.
However, due to the routing system of Lazada, it is still indefinite that a Lazmall customer
can directly connect to a Lazmall CS agent. There is a process for those cases:

Figure 16: Process of handling transaction (source: Internal training process)
Ones can see that for Lazmall customers, the process to handle is more complicated due to the
issue of system. In case Lazmall customers first contact to a non-Lazmall agent, their
problems are not solved right after they explain, but they have to wait another time to be

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