Customer Service Management

Customer Service Management

Introduction

Any profitable making companies would have realized the importance of “working with customer for success”. Globalization has even changed the business mindset on “producing faster and cheaper”, where quality customer care and service become the only sustainable competitive advantage. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is considered as a business strategy with customer orientation mindset. Its goal is to maximize the profitability, revenue and customer satisfaction. This paper evaluates the CRM approach of the selected business domain and propose change plan for uplifting customer satisfaction level.

Discussion

The concept of “global village” (McLuhan4 1962) was originally referred to the rapid information flow that was possible. It affects the customer influence in two levels, where businesses are becoming truly Global (multi-national) and businesses are more challenging (competitiveness). In the 90's, focus of delivering product has shifted from being product oriented to knowledge oriented, and the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system were introduced to integrate systems to achieve cost effective operations. Yet, at this stage it is not considered as customer centricity because ERP only helps to deliver faster and perhaps cheaper products, on customer demands.

Customer needs refer to WHY the customer buys, not WHAT the customer buys. Customer needs are the internal conditions or motivating desires behind a customer's purchase or usage of a product or service. Customer needs are complex and involve many dimensions and nuances including beliefs, confidence, motivations, preferences, decision making process and more.

The CRM terms is not clearly spelled out by the management group. Even if it is, the value statements and objectives are not cascaded to the middle and lower management levels.

The tradition project lifecycle with the help of information technology systems may only serve customer service at a level of basic needs. Communication tools such as emails and SMS have become the blocks to closer communications ...