Customer Service Management

BMGT-395 (3)

Course Syllabus

This practical, discovery class depends upon active, consistent student involvement. Check our WebTycho classroom and your email at least once every two days and respond to queries within one day if possible, two at the maximum (even if just to say when you will be able to give a more complete answer to the request). I will try to allow you time to explore the subject both individually and in small groups while giving you feedback on completed assignments.

There will be both individual and small group work. In addition to studying the assigned text, you must satisfactorily complete the following:

a. Weekly or biweekly assignments to be shared and critiqued with other students.

1) Use WebTycho conference and study group areas. We will use email as a back-up system.

2) Find and share with the class at least one different article or web site a week that relates to the current, just past, or just upcoming week's topic.

3) Complete individual assignments as shown in the Schedule and Assignments Sheet.

b. A Journal on your reactions to and progress through this course submitted twice monthly.

c. Participate in group discussions and lead class discussions on designated topics.

d. Course Project: Assess, using both qualitative and quantitative techniques, the customer service program and results of a business nominated by you and approved by me, your instructor. (See below.)

e. An open-book, take-home mid-term exam accessed on-line at 0000 hours UCT/GMT, 8 March 2003 (return your response within 48 hours to the WT assignment area).

f. An open-book, take-home final exam accessed on-line at 0000 hours UCT/GMT, 10 May 2003 (return your response within 48 hours to the WT assignment area).

Class Participation: (25% of course grade)

• individual work,
• a journal in which you reflect on your process of learning and sharing during the course, and
• small group work.

Course Project: (25%)

Alternative 1:

Look around you. Find a customer service activity or program that you would like to investigate and gain the approval of the mangers involved to conduct a college research project in their facility. You will conduct your project in the following four stages:

1. Describe what exists at present in detail. Make sure you understand the system within which customer service is supposed to occur.
   
   
2. Based on key managerial concerns and your own observations, develop a customer survey instrument and customer service metrics.
   
   
3. Implement your plan; collect data; analyze your data.
   
   
4. Report your findings.

You and I will agree on the businesses to be studied. A base or post support activity is always a good candidate for such a customer service study. If there is sufficient interest and support, this could become a class project (for example surveying AAFES or NEX customers around the world). Use Anton's USA Electronics example as a guide for the type of data that you need to collect as well as the analysis, final interpretation and presentation you need to complete.

• You will report your progress at the end of each stage to me and the activity managers in a formal report. If you prepare a different report for the managers, provide me with a copy of it.
• Take care to test and refine any survey instrument or metric before employing it on your target audience. Secure my approval at the end of Stage 2.
• If you use a group of friends to help you collect information, please carefully prepare them with the terms of reference and operational definitions for the study..
• Analysis of data is not possible without quantitative tools. Polish yours before they are needed.
• Your course project will be like a case analysis. Use my case analysis guidelines, among others, to help you.
• See the Schedule and Assignment Sheet for due dates for each stage.

[IMPORTANT NOTE concerning Course Project Alternative 1::

In the US military environment here in Europe, we do have some problem with customer surveys in certain establishments. For example, the on-base/post banks and financial institutions, the military exchanges and commissaries have rather strict rules that make it difficult for us to conduct student surveys. On the other hand, in-house surveys at legal offices, base gym & recreation activities, even Pass and ID offices have been successful and useful for both my students and the client.

Indeed, you may want to characterize our surveys as feedback questionnaires. The word "survey" seems to set off alarm bells in the military communities related to improper data collection, a cover for selling something, and in general attempts to exploit fellow members of our community. So you will need to take care that we do not give that impression.]

Alternative 2:

An alternative to Steps 2 and 3 of Term Project Alternative 1 described above will be to examine in detail the customer service function of a local organization drawing heavily from the 2002 edition of Jon Anton's CRM book which I will make available to you.

(Anton's more recent work focuses on call centers and provides a very useful addition to our understanding of how customer service really works.)

The CS/CRM function you select will have a telephone or computer link to the customer as the primary mode of contact or at least a commonly used supplement to face-to-face contact with customer service representative.

You will use the techniques Anton and his co-author, Natalie Petouhoff, describe in their book as a minimum, for data collection and analysis. You will get my approval for your research design prior to data collection and summarize your data collection process in a brief report to me prior to analyzing the data collected.

Steps 1 and 4 remain the same.

This option will allow you to bypass some of the more difficult quantitative methods used in Anton's 1996 work (regression analysis and analytical model building). You will nonetheless be responsible for understanding his key concepts and the important implications they have for the whole field of CRM. His linkage between quantitative and qualitative methods is particularly important.

However, the price will be grasping the details of the optional book for this course, Anton and Petouhoff's CRM book.

The questions you will address in this alternative term project include:

• How does your selected CRM function compare with others (benchmark both internally and externally)?
• What are good customer relations worth (customer lifetime value) to your target activity?
• How does (and should) the activity measure the people who provide the service?
• What CRM agent training could be taken that would provide a favorable impact on performance and return on investment? What is the ROI of such training?
• What service levels have been and should be delivered to which customers? How do we measure them?
• Is there a continual improvement path? Is so, lay it out in detail. If not, explain in detail why.

This is not a correspondence course. Your presence in our virtual classroom is a vital part of the learning experience for everyone in this course. Consequently lack of consistent participation 2-3 times weekly in spite of long hours at work, computer problems, deployments, vacations, business trips, other courses, etc. may earn you a grade of F(n) as such action overrides the grading percentages shown above.