A DAY-IN-THE-LIFE OF THE CUSTOMER SERVICE DESK

A CASE STUDY OF THE ELECTRO TECH

CASE FACTS:
Bob Peter, who joined the company after doing his intern-ship is concerned with dealing the customer queries of the company. Bob Peter faces a delivery problem of a product to the customer Reliable. Bob works out a lot to make his customer satisfied about the delivery of the product on Wednesday which is dealt with in this case.

1. PROCESS FLOW DIAGRAM

Customer placing an order/enquiry

Customer Support Desk

Reliable

Bob Peter

Bryan Luther
Plant Production

Frank
Quality Control Analyst

Shipping

Laurie

Product delivery to Customer

Reliable

Various functions are performing their tasks such as the customer place an order to Customer support desk and the concerned person of this department will check the particular order with all the reports like production report and inventory report to meet the requirement of the concerned customer. If the order is not in the inventory report then he has to wait till the production of that order by production department. Then it will be sent for the quality check and for testing of technical specification for the issue of certificate of compliance and then it is sent to the logistic/shipping department for packing and finally the order is delivered to the customer.

2. PROBLEMS:
Inspite of continuous growth, Eletrotech is still facing many problems in the process flow because of lack of proper co-ordination among various departments. High product quality failure rates, Increase in the inventory cost, Non automation of payroll & invoicing during 1970s &80s, Inaccuracy in inventory reporting, Budgetary constraints, Staffing limitations , Y2K problem, Decrease in customer satisfaction due to delayed shipments, No cross functional integration, Ineffective decision-making due to improper data storage. Coordination and integration of the management information system between the different departments is not proper. Delay in shipment is arising due to non availability of the receipt to issue certificate of compliance. This is very tedious and takes a lot of time for the dock manager to respond to a concerned situation. Dependency is more in this because of less integration among the departments.

3. POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS:

 Preparing Plant, Distribution & Inventory reports for each order on a regular basis will help to maintain good database.  Integration of the MIS among all functions will help the process move fast, which in turn helps the company to deliver goods quickly and retain customer satisfaction.  The integrated MIS will help to reduce the paper work and automatically gives instruction and certificate of compliance from the database of the information system. This will save a lot of time.  Upgrading the information system time to time by allotting certain amount of money from profits every year.