Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Service system-3

Definition
"Service system" is a term very frequently used in the service management, service operations, services marketing, service engineering, and service design literature. While the term frequently appears, it is rarely defined. Given the growing importance of this term in the literature, this entry begins to organize historical usages, examples, and inferred definitions. A service system worldview is a system of systems that interact via value propositions.

One recent definition of a service system is a value coproduction configuration of people, technology, internal and external service systems connected via value propositions, and shared information (language, laws, measures, etc.). The smallest service system is a single person and the largest service system is the global economy. The external service system of the global economy is considered to be nature's services or ecosystem services. Service systems can be characterized by the value that results from interaction between service systems, whether the interactions are between people, businesses, or nations. Most service system interactions aspire to be win-win, non-coercive, and non-intrusive. However, some service systems may perform coercive service activities. For example, agents of the state may use coercion in accordance with laws of the land.

Ref: wikipedia, blinds, roman shades, vertical blinds

Thursday, January 22, 2009

Service system-2

Service system designers or architects often seek to exploit an economic complementarily or network effect to rapidly grow and scale up the service. For example, credit cards usage is part of a service system in which the more people and businesses that use and accept the credit cards, the more value the credit cards have to the provider and all stakeholders in the service system. Service system innovation often requires integrating technology innovation, business model (or value proposition) innovation, social-organizational innovation, and demand (new customer wants, needs, aspirations) innovation.

For example, a national service system may be designed with policies that enable more citizens (the customers of the nation) to become an entrepreneur, and thereby create more innovation and wealth for the nation. Service systems may include payment mechanisms for selecting a level of service to be provided (upfront or one time payment) or payment based on downstream value sharing or taxation derived from customers who received the benefit of the service (downstream or ongoing payment). Payments may also be in the form of credit (creative arts) or other types of intangible value (see anthropological theories of value and theory of value).

Monday, January 19, 2009

Service System-1

Every service system is both a service provider and a customer of multiple types of services. Because service systems are designed both in how they provision and consume services, services systems are often linked into a complex service value chain or value network where each link is a value proposition. I was talking with owner of blinds store online, they sell vertical blinds and roman shades online. He says that service systems are something which helps they do make their day to day businesses easy with multiple location access. Service systems may be nested inside of service systems (e.g., staff and operating room unit inside a hospital that is part of a nationwide healthcare provider network).

Service system designers or architects often seek to exploit an economic complimentarily or network effect to rapidly grow and scale up the service. For example, credit cards usage is part of a service system in which the more people and businesses that use and accept the credit cards, the more value the credit cards have to the provider and all stakeholders in the service system. Service system innovation often requires integrating technology innovation, business model (or value proposition) innovation, social-organizational innovation, and demand (new customer wants, needs, aspirations) innovation.

Ref: Wikipedia

Friday, January 16, 2009

Service System

A service system (or customer service system, CSS) is a configuration of technology and organizational networks designed to deliver services that satisfy the needs, wants, or aspirations of customers. Marketing, operations, and global environment considerations have significant implications for the design of a service system. Three criteria used to classify service systems include: customer contact, capital intensity, and level of customer involvement. Properly designed service systems employ technology or organizational networks that can allow relatively inexperienced people to perform very sophisticated tasks quickly — vaulting them over normal learning curve delays. Ideally, empowerment of both service provider employees and customers (often via self service) results from well designed service systems.

Service systems range from an individual person equipped with tools of the trade (e.g., architect, entrepreneur) to a portion of a government agency or business (e.g., branch office of a post office or bank) to complete multinational corporations and their information systems (e.g, Domino's Pizza, Federal Express). Hospitals, universities, cities, and national governments are designed service systems. The language, norms, attitudes, and beliefs of the people that make up a service system may evolve over time, as people adjust to new circumstances. In this sense, service systems are a type of complex system that is partially designed and partially evolving. Service systems are designed to deliver or provision services, but they often consume services as well.

Ref: wikipedia

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Customer Privacy

We were talking about privacy and data security in our previous post. We talked Customer privacy. Today we continue with that. Since they operate for-profit, commercial organizations also cannot spend an unlimited amount on precautions and remain competitive - a commercial context tends to limit privacy measures, and to motivate organizations to share data when working in partnership.

This has led to many moral hazards and outrageous customer privacy violation incidents, and has led to consumer privacy laws in most countries, especially in the European Union, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. The United States has no such law and relies on corporate customer privacy to ensure consumer privacy in general.

Some services, notably telecommunications including Internet, imply collecting a vast array of information about user's activities in the course of things, and may also require consultation of these data to prepare bills. Telecom data must be kept for seven years in the US and Canada, to permit dispute and consultation about phone charges.


Ref:
wikipedia agents website design, wood blinds

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Privacy and Data Security -1

One of the primary functions of CRM software is to collect information about customers. When gathering data as part of a CRM solution, a company must consider customer privacy and data security with respect to legal and cultural environments. Some customers prefer assurance that their data is not shared with third parties without their consent and that it cannot be illicitly accessed by third parties.

Customer Privacy
Customer privacy measures are those taken by commercial organizations to ensure that confidential customer data is not stolen or abused. Since most such organizations have a strong competitive incentive to retain an exclusive access to these data, and since customer trust is usually a high priority, most companies take some security engineering measures to protect customer privacy. Company like Agents web world is good with customer privacy.


However, these vary in effectiveness, and would not typically meet the much higher standards of client confidentiality applied by ethical codes or legal codes in banking or law, nor patient privacy measures in medicine, nor rigorous "national security" measures in military and intelligence organizations.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Strategy and Successes for CRM

CRM strategies can vary in size, complexity and scope. Some companies consider a CRM strategy to only focus on the management of a team of salespeople. However, other CRM strategies can cover customer interaction across the entire organization. Many commercial CRM software packages that are available provide features that serve sales, marketing, event management, project management and finance.

Successes of CRM
While there are numerous reports of "failed" implementations of various types of CRM projects, these are often the result of unrealistic high expectations and exaggerated claims by
CRM vendors. Many of these "failures" are also related to data quality and availability. Data cleaning is a major issue. If the company CRM strategy is to track life-cycle revenues, costs, margins and interactions between individual customers, this must be reflected in all business processes. Data must be extracted from multiple sources (e.g., departmental/divisional databases, including sales, manufacturing, supply chain, logistics, finance, service, etc.), requiring an integrated, and comprehensive business processing system to be in place with defined structures and data quality. If not, interfaces must be developed and implemented to extract data from different systems. This creates a demand far beyond customer satisfaction to understand the full business-to-business relationship. For this reason, CRM is more than a sales or customer interaction system.

The experience from many companies is that a clear CRM requirement with regard to reports (e.g., input and output requirements) is of vital importance before starting any implementation. With a proper demand specification, a great deal of time and money can be saved based on realistic expectations of systems capability. A well operating
CRM system can be an extremely powerful tool for management and customer strategies.

ref: Insurnace Software, Insurance CRM Software, wikipedia