Strategic Plan and Recommendations for Improving Customer Service Performance with Effective Technology Management

This article makes up Chapter 1 of the free, open access book titled, Information Systems: A Manager's Guide to Harnessing Technology, by John Gallaugher. Please ensure that you read the entire Chapter 1 of the book consisting of 3 parts (Part 1 Introduction; Part 2 Don’t Guess, Gather Data; and Part 3 Moving Forward).

Datatronics is a worldwide, high-performance supplier of integrated resource planning solutions to many global companies. Datatronics products include products used for telecommunications, industrial controls, medical, power supply, automotive, and computer supplies. This case study assignment explores key issues and role of customer service, with respect to the US branch of the company located in Romoland, CA. It includes a comparison of customer service and customer satisfaction. Joel McGivern is the Chief Information Officer, while Matt Rubenzahl is the head of customer service center, North America. Matt is required to evaluate the status of customer service at Datatronics and provide recommendations to the Joel, the

Intro The business environment is very competitive. Consequently, companies need to offer customers efficient and reliable service. If they do not, customers will switch to more consumer efficient companies. Furthermore, as companies grow in size, it becomes harder to keep track of the growing amount of customer information. If a company does a poor job of organizing and maintaining customer records and data, it can result in problems for both the company and the consumer. This paper will focus on the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, more commonly known as 3M, and how it improved its customer service and reduced cost by improving its management information system. Sources consulted

Doug Allred was Vice President of Customer Advocacy organization of the Cisco’s corporation. This organization was erected to consolidated all functions that directly touched the customer but sales to provide high-quality customer service. Since August 2001, the IT market turned down and brought severe challenges to Cisco as the company had to lay off 18% of its employees and reorganized its structure, transforming from decentralized organizational structure with three business units to centralized organization. However, these changes stabilized the volatile situation of the economy but threatened Cisco’s customer focus, a

In customer service, the telephone is the second most important link (Lucus, 2015). Modern business use telephones in their day-to-day operations and to communicate with both internal and external customers (Lucus, 2015). Traveling to meet with customers and vendors face to face can be expensive and time-consuming (Lucus, 2015). With the technology of today, you can dial a telephone number or type a text into a cell phone and connect to a customer or vendor half-way around the world almost instantaneously (Lucus, 2015). With fax machines and computer modems, documents and information can be sent in a matter of minutes to customers and vendors miles away (Lucus, 2015). With all those tools, readily available more companies have set up both inbound and outbound telephone staffs (Lucus, 2015). Companies are expanding their customer contacts and are more likely to reach total customers satisfaction through those types of trained specialist (Lucus, 2015).

1. Why don’t information systems projects work out as planned? What causes the differences between the plan and reality?

Customer complaints have over doubled in the last few years. This shows some big issues in the customer service management. Research which areas customers are most dissatisfied with and support the staff in gaining new skills to meet the customers ever changing needs.

Diamond Cluster Entertainment is trying to build a solid relationship with their loyal customers. For the past few year customer satisfaction have declined

After investigating all available data it became apparent that although the organisation has a customer service system, it seems to get ignored. Staff is unaware of it and senior management don’t seem to be monitoring it closely. No performance management has been completed this quarter nor does it appear that it has ever been completed which clearly shows that sales and customer service team leaders are not conducting required performance management. Performance data is being collected but no action is being taken to address

The role played by the IT in the company to the rest of the organization is reactive to business conditions rather than a proactive approach. IT has been busy establishing several IT processes, policies, and projects in order to catch up with current demand from customers, and has been relying on the “diving catch” approach of finishing things at the very last minute.

An effective Customer Relationship Management (CRM) program can be used to identify, retain, satisfy and obtain customers by using technology to optimize strategies for understanding customers’ needs to manage business interactions with current, former, and prospective customers. Additionally, CRM also enables companies to maximize internal, external, marketing and customer service operations to better address the needs of the customer building a better relationship with customers that a more profitable. (Ahmad & Buttle, 2001)

Today, customer relationship management is very important to the business world. Most of the companies established a department and the programs to manage their relationship with the customers. Customer relationship management (CRM) is a business strategy which designed to help a company to understand and look forward to the needs of its potential and current customers (Anderson & Stang, 2000). Customer data is being collected in several different areas of the company, stored in a central database, analyzed, and distributed to key points (Anderson & Stang, 2000).The business world once was “product-centric”, the companies just provided what they could produce. However, it is now become “customer-centric”, they provide products and service

In some situation, a system too large to build without an overall plan that coordinates the people working on it. According to Sharon Florentine, senior writer of CIO.com, 50 percent of businesses experience IT project fail in 2012. The most common reason, responded by 74 percent of interviewees, is a lack of resources to meet project demands [4]. Three years later, the failure number increased that 55 percent of businesses surveyed experienced an IT project failure within last 12 months [5].

Today, more and more companies find that cultivating customer loyalty is a key factor to achieve success. Customer relationship management (CRM) focuses on the relationship between customer and company. Due to this feature, many companies are trying to establish their own CRM system for helping them to connect new customers and boost old customers’ long-term loyalty. CRM systems include operations and analysis, and relationship marketing strategy and supporting, customer-centric business processes (Buttle 2004). With the development of information technology (IT), using CRM system

But, some of the disadvantages of customer relationship management system appeared at the same time. Company which using CRM is put too much focus on sales department and not integrate with accounting and marketing information, the customer relationships spread the whole life cycle but the company representative was forgetting and not connect with the service departments. In addition, the ability in performance will go down if the process of CRM dehumanized. It is because the system need people create the needed information and the human thought is needed to input information. The inputting data