Colin Brown, managing director, Tesseract
Colin Brown, managing director at service management software
supplier Tesseract, believes the Internet has created one of the
most exciting development phases ever in customer service: for the
service provider, it has opened up a new world of possibilities for
real-time information management and sharing and, for customers, it
has improved the speed and quality of communications,
writes
Ross Bentley.
"The Web can provide everyone in the service chain - including
customers - with an unrivalled level of access to information, and
cost savings," says Brown.
"For example, by adopting e-mail communications, service providers
can handle more customer requests with fewer call takers. Thus they
reduce overheads, or at least maintain costs in the face of
increasing call rates. Meanwhile, customers, when preferred, can
contact their service providers whenever they want."
Brown gives the example of Continuous Power International, a
provider of uninterrupted power supplies. He says the introduction
of Internet communications for its field engineers via laptops -
using e-mail to issue and close service calls, and to
simultaneously automatically update stock records - has generated
significant savings across the business. These have come, for
instance, from saving engineers the time, travel expenses and
mobile phone charges that were traditionally spent collecting and
closing calls.
"Continuous Power's business is all about service, and making the
internal operation more efficient means that customers will
continue to receive the standard of service they deserve," he says.
Brown also points to garage equipment supplier Tecalemit, which has
tailored its screen displays to suit the individual needs of each
customer. Its user sites across the UK log all calls to Tecalemit
via the Internet.
"Tecalemit wants its operators to input certain data using simple
point-and-click routines, and it wants the screens and windows to
react to that information in a certain way," explains Brown. "It
also wants 'linked' windows of information so that when the user
logs-in they can see all the call history data relevant to them and
their site."
After entering the appropriate fault details into a memo field, the
customer's call request activates a trigger that sends Tecalemit an
e-mail. The request is then dispatched to the relevant field
engineer. Tecalemit closes the call by informing the customer site
via e-mail.
From the host system's point of view, Brown says the advantages of
the Web are clearly of major potential benefit, especially to
global corporates - companies with country-focused service
operations that are characterised by individual databases that run
in isolation. These systems are usually co-ordinated and managed by
a central team that is forever struggling to gain a global
perspective of their activities.
"There are clear management rewards to linking and consolidating
all this information into a central database," says Brown. "But
having a central database is only part of the story. The real
economic advantages of consolidating service management operations
can only be gained if browser-based technology is implemented."
"Distributing" the service management function via a browser means
service providers can immediately eliminate their dependence on
local IT skills and make obsolete the traditional costs of software
ownership, says Brown.
"The customer service industry has always been a people business,
and it always will be, because people like to talk to people. But,
where and when appropriate, Internet technology can be used to good
effect to improve customer satisfaction levels."