یک سیستم مبتنی بر دانش چند دیدگاهی برای مدیریت خدمات مشتری

The e-business arena is a dynamic, complex and demanding environment. It is essential to make optimal reuse of knowledge of customer services across various functional units of the enterprise. On the other hand, it is also important to ensure that the customer service staff can access and be trained up with dynamically updated knowledge that meets the changing business environment of an enterprise in customer services. However, conventional way of customer service management (CSM) is inadequate to achieve the multi-perspective of an enterprise for achieving knowledge acquisition, knowledge diffusion, business automation and business performance measurement so as to drive the continuous improvement of the customer service quality. In this paper, a multi-perspective knowledge-based system (MPKBS) is proposed for CSM. The MPKBS incorporates various artificial intelligence technologies such as case-based reasoning (CBR) and adaptive time-series model which are used for decision analysis, performance measurement and monitoring. A prototype customer service portal has been built based on the MPKBS and implemented successfully in a consultancy business.

The rapid development of information technology (IT) and electronic business has led to a great demand for achieving customer service automation on the internet. It is essential to make optimal reuse of knowledge of customer service across various functional units of the enterprise and ensure the customer service staff can access and be trained up with dynamically updated knowledge that meets the business strategies of an enterprise in customer services. However, increasing competition (whether for profit or non-profit) is forcing businesses to pay much more attention to satisfy customers. One of the essential ingredients of e-business is how to gain a better understanding of customer needs. By comparison, Meltzer (2001) claims that organisations can boost profits by 100% just by retaining 5% of their most valuable customers. The most successful businessman in the world, Bill Gates from Microsoft (Source: Business@ the Speed of Thought, 1999) agrees that ‘customer service will become the primary value-added function in every business.’ Organisations that can successfully understand and manage the behaviour of customers and customer service quality will enjoy competitive advantage. Customer service management (CSM) offers a service oriented management interface between customer and service provider (Langer, Loidl, & Nerb, 1999). CSM includes a wide range of activities, ranging from the time that there is a customer need for a product such as, requisition of a quotation to eventually providing ongoing support to customers, who have purchased the product. Since customer service processes are becoming more complex and a large number of decisions have to be made within a short period of time, the conventional way of customer services based on fax, e-mail and telephone might not satisfy customer needs in electronic business. To automate and to retain the knowledge of an enterprise in customer services, a knowledge-based system (KBS) is much needed for facilitating knowledge acquisition, sharing and diffusion (Davenport and Prusak, 1998 and Preece et al., 2001) among customer service staff. Such kind of system should be robust enough to response to the customer requirements and make sound recommendations to resolve the customer problems anytime and anywhere via the web. In this paper, a multi-perspective knowledge-based system (MPKBS) is proposed for customer service automation. A prototype customer service portal has been built based on the model and its capabilities were evaluated through the trial-run implementation at a selected reference site.

In order to provide a higher quality of customer service and to achieve a better customer satisfaction, a knowledge-enabled infrastructure is much needed for achieving multi-perspective of an enterprise in the acquisition and diffusion of knowledge, automation and hence measurement of the performance of its customer service processes in an enterprise. By integrating the knowledge-based and computing technologies, a MPKBS is proposed for CSM. The capability and advantages of the MPKBS are demonstrated through the trial implementation of a prototype customer service portal in a consultancy business. It is verified that the MPKBS provides high quality customer services with fast and efficient customer responses. It also allows the company to capture the valuable experience and tacit knowledge of the staff in performing customer services. This helps to drive the continuous improvement of customer service quality. Potential applications of the infrastructure can be found in the financial, consultancy and service industries.