A Customer-centric Web

Customer be damned is the way complaints are managed in most companies even
today. Once a product is sold, customers have to literally bang their heads to
get further attention from vendors. And the enterprise resource planning (ERPs)
and customer relationship management (CRMs) of today haven’t made things any
easier. The customer service function or complaint management continues to be
ignored or given only lip service even after implementation of enterprise
applications costing crores of rupees. And the simple reason for this, neither
ERP nor CRM packages have been built to address customer service. According to
Trilochan Singh, Director of FirsteService, a Mumbai based web solutions
company. "If you study ERP and CRM solutions, you will find that their main
focus is not in this area at all." So, what makes Singh qualified enough to
make such a statement?

Singh first realized the demand for customer service applications, when the
Godrej group asked him to develop a stand-alone package almost four years back.
Decibells, another one of his companies implemented the solution and there was
no looking back after that. Singh subsequently converted the desktop application
into a product and found considerable interest from large customer focussed
companies. Decibells added Epson and Onward Novell to its list of clients using
the customer service package. But that was only the beginning. Singh built
domain experience in this area and continued to improve the package.

Today, the solution has been transformed into a web-based application and is
called Complaint Management System (CMS) available from Singh’s new company,
FirsteService. Singh is offering the package on a pay-as-you-use basis, which
makes it affordable for small and medium companies. It also lets companies get
on board in 15 days flat. In addition, there is an annual charge to handle
database transfers and software management. Compare this with months and months
of waiting before a company gets to see the customer-tracking module in ERP or
CRM implementations. What’s Singh’s line of reconciliation for companies
going through parallel ERP or CRM implementations? Since such turnarounds are
long and drawn out, he recommends using his product upfront. And when the ERP or
CRM customer service module is up the database that has been built up till then,
can be integrated.

A sign-up company for CMS gets a customized look and feel web-site, which it
can announce to its product or service customers. Distressed customers access
the web site, identify themselves by registering, and then enter the complaint.
This complaint or query from a customer is now available to the company on the
other side, which can assign it to a service executive either automatically or
manually using a service manager. The service executive evaluates the nature of
the complaint, decides on the course of action, and informs the customer by
posting a response on the web site. The customer subsequently views the response
on the web site. Voice-based call centers can also use this solution. The only
difference, the service executive enters the complaint for the customer at the
web site and also posts the response at an appropriate time.

Customers have rights to view only records of their queries and related
company responses. Security rights also prevent any deletions in the entries,
either of complaints or responses. In this way a complete history of complaints
and responsive actions can be sorted by various parameters. These include type
of complaints, distribution amongst executives, duration of time to satisfy the
customer and so on. FirsteService has now finished pilot testing at a number of
customer locations and should be announcing its list of first customers shortly.
The application runs on IBM servers collocated at BSCS, a Mumbai based
datacenter service provider. FirsteService accesses these back-end servers via a
2Mbps link, which allows it to download databases and forward it to subscribing
clients.

Arun Shankar in Mumbai

The author has been executive editor of Dataquest. You can contact him at arun_shankar62@yahoo.co.in