Table of Contents:

Definition and Overview

1. An Environment without a Customer Care System

2. Develop or Buy

3. Needs of Consumers

4. Needs of Service Providers

5. Technology for Customer Care

6. Functional Requirements of a Customer Care System

7. Customer Service

8. Telemarketing

9. Repair

10. Implementation

Self-Test

Glossary

PDF of this tutorial

Based on the needs of consumers as well as the needs of service providers, major functional requirements of a customer care system are as follows:

• capability to access relevant information—A customer care system provides only relevant information, allowing customer service representatives to interact rapidly with customers.
• capability to hide nonrelevant information—A customer care system is tailored so that nonrelevant information for the business task at hand is hidden.
• ease of use—The CSR must be able to focus on the interaction with the customer as opposed to focusing on the use of the customer care system.
• decision support—The customer care system must have an expert system to take advantage of the service provider's pool of experience on sales and repairs.
• self-serve capability—A customer care system should support its access through IVR and the Internet.

In the long term, a customer care system should provide flexibility in the following ways:

• support for changing business processes—Decision support tools in particular must be easily modifiable to avoid becoming the bottleneck in evolving a business process.
• ability to evolve toward convergence—The customer care system should provide the capability to add new products, packages, and pricing models.
• support sharing of information with other service providers—The customer care system should be able to provide selected information to other service providers.
• support for electronic bonding—The customer care system should provide support for emerging electronic bonding standards.