Introduction

                           Introduction

Four college graduates started SureVac technologies 15 years ago. It manufactures vacuum cleaning system. Today, SureVac is leader in vacuum cleaning technology. It sells its products through a massive network of 30 company-owned stores and 200 franchisee outlets.

SureVac today offers more than 10 products for home and industry users. It caters to both the segments directly or through its dealer’s distribution network. The 30 company-owned stores sell vacuum cleaning equipment directly to home and industry users while the 200 franchises sell vacuum cleaning system to home users only. 

Drawbacks of the Current System

SureVac has witnessed a major decline in business recently. SureVac has recently conducted a market research to determine the cause for decline in sales. It was found that SureVac business was suffering because of following reasons:

1.       Numerous customer complaints were not handled. Another large number of complaints were handled after a considerable delay, leading to customer dissatisfaction.

2.       The product is not designed properly and there has been no innovation over the last few years.

3.       The quality of plastic used is not very good.

SureVac organized a meeting at its headquarters. It was attended by a number of customer care executives, product engineers, and franchisees and senior management. The discussion revealed that:

1.       Franchisees used to log customer complaints regularly but the customer care representatives rarely follow up.

2.       The customer care executives were not aware of the incoming calls and how much time was spent an answering those calls. They also did not know the priority status of clients, and difficulty understanding franchisees problem.

3.       The engineers started that they were rarely aware of what the customers wanted. A lowered quality of service had led to people spreading negative word of mouth. In addition, lack of innovation had added to the steep decline in business. 

 Advantage of Proposed System

By looking at the existing system, the management wants to use a computerized system that will take care of call management and provide information that can be used later to take strategic decisions. This system should be globally accessible and should be able to integrate with other system in the organization. In addition, all the data stored in this system should be secured.

The envisioned system has the following features:

• An internet-enabled application is created.

• A central database is created to store the information, which includes the list of customers, franchisees, products, and contracts.

•  The central database captures all the information related to every customer call, which includes information on details of customer’s complaint/query, details of store or franchisee that received the call and details of the nature of problem/query of customer.
•  The web site provide access to three types of users
  ·        Internal users are administrators and users
  ·        Eternal users are employees and representatives of the franchisees
  ·        Customers

• All the users will have a username and a password. The usernames of internal users will be their employee codes, and the usernames of external customers will be their franchisee names followed by their employee codes. The customers can choose their username. All users will have the option of retrieving the registered usernames and passwords by providing authenticated information such as their date of birth.

• Automatic generation of E-mail format that has to be sent to both the user whom the case has been assigned to and to customer in case he has generated a case himself.

• A central knowledge base will be created to facilitate knowledge exchange within the SureVac. All the common problems and queries will be assigned a unique code and solution will be posted against the code.

•  Management level users will be able to generate customized report based on their requirement.