Master of Agribusiness / Department of Agricultural Economics / Vincent R. Amanor-Boadu / As the integration of technology and data rises in production agriculture, John Deere dealers in North America are in a constant quest to differentiate themselves and be more than just an equipment provider. Customers with more technologically advanced products are requiring more support from the dealerships. Each dealership has a unique opportunity to provide unprecedented levels of support and each may do it in a slightly different way. This creates a challenge for Deere & Company in providing resources and support to those dealers in their endeavors. This thesis was requested by Deere & Company (John Deere) to provide the company with information on Dealer Customer Support Centers in North America. In order to provide resources and tools for dealers to be successful, it is necessary to understand what they are currently doing with customer support centers and the barriers to implementing more. An online survey was sent out to the Integrated Solutions Manager at every John Deere Dealer organization in North America. From that survey there were a total of 127 responses. The two most common forms of customer support systems that dealers are using are having Integrated Solutions Staff members take calls directly from customers and having someone within the dealership answer the phone and manually route the call to the right person for support. Data also shows that some of the less common but more technologically advanced methods of support have been implemented more in the past 12 months. Survey analysis indicates that only a small percentage of dealers have a true centralized dedicated support center for customers. This subset of dealers is utilizing several different methods to support customers. The two indicative methods are having a 1- 800 number for customers to utilize for support and having a dedicated staff to help customers remotely. Dealers are frequently using several types of tools and resources to help support customers, the most frequently occurring ones include JDLink™ and Data Management Services. Respondents indicated using many other tools to provide value to customers including John Deere Remote Display Access, clinics and optimization sessions and many others. Barriers to implementing more complex forms of customer support are numerous, the biggest of which is the cost of implementation and lack of resources to support a more sophisticated customer support system. With this information, John Deere is better positioned to provide resources and support to our dealer channel facing these challenges.

Thesis (D.B.A.)--Boston University / PLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at open-help@bu.edu. Thank you. / Quality management has become a key competitive factor (Garvin, 1988). Product design quality requires incorporating the wants and needs of the customer base into new product development, and product conformance quality relies upon identifying and resolving flaws found in the products. Collecting this feedback requires that the boundary between the customer and the firm be spanned, and applying the feedback requires that it be communicated to the functional group that can effect product improvement. Through its constant interaction with customers, the customer support group is well positioned to sense this customer feedback and communicate it to the product development group. This dissertation examined the strategic role of the customer support organization within software companies as a quality assurance agent. While traditionally viewed as a rectifier of external quality failures, the research model proposed that customer support could also serve appraisal and preventive quality assurance roles through its boundary spanning activities. A small sample, comparative case study tested hypotheses about customer support's boundary spanning and provided for grounded theory building. The research revealed three primary findings. First, service delivery designs that included higher levels of customer contact allowed the service agents to sense a broader range of customer issues. Second, product quality increased when the customer data were collected in a detailed format structured to meet the practices of the development group. Third, product quality also increased when the customer support group had more involvement in product management decisions throughout the product development cycle. Through grounded theory-building, the research identified contextual factors that fostered a preventative quality assurance role for customer support. / 2031-01-01

This thesis is located within the field of Information Systems implementation. More specifically it focuses within Information Systems at the issues associated with implementation of business proves-based change. There is much evidence, both theoretical and empirical, to suggest that there are a high percentage of Information Systems and Business Process implementation failures (Meredith 1981, Lucas 1981, Walsham 1993, Land et al 1989). The aim of this thesis is twofold. Firstly to analyse the reasons behind the failures in process-based change implementations and secondly to provide a solution that will enable companies to overcome some of the problems and thus reduce the number of these failures. This research is based on a joint project between IBM PSS and the University if Plymouth. The research focuses specifically on the implementation of process-based change occurring in IBM Product Support Services (PSS). PSS is primarily responsible for the maintenance of IBM and non-IBM hardware and software and the selling of services associated with them. In order to understand what happens during implementation the researcher participated in three action research projects. All three projects were part of an IBM world-wide Business Process Re-engineering project called Customer Relationship Management. To ensure the validity of this action research process the researcher has closely followed the guidance compiled by Eden and Huxham. This research will present a framework that has been developed to improve the management of implementation projects. The framework is based on a synthesis of theoretical evidence and empirical findings. The empirical findings have been developed from investigating the reasons for failure in the three action research projects. All findings were analysed using the ‘Grounded Theory’ approach. The framework consists of five dominant themes, which are senior management commitment, analysis of problem situation, project planning and management, proves focus and user involvement. In the researchers view the problem of unsuccessful implementation is a complex one which may only begin to be improved when all the themes are addressed together as a whole. In order to test the themes of the framework a process for application was required. The process developed for using the framework involves applying a focus group at project initiation and questionnaires throughout the course of the project. The purpose of the focus group is to understand the themes of the themes of the framework within the context of the particular problem situation being investigated. The questionnaire is used to audit each theme of the framework to identify potential areas of implementation weakness. T-test analysis is carries out on the questionnaire results to measure whether any changes between questionnaires results are statistically significant. The framework was successfully applied to a fourth project. The T-test results indicated that applying the framework to the project throughout the course of the implementation had significantly improved the implementation. The originality of this research is in the framework and its application. This thesis will describe the history of implementation successes and failures at IBM, survey appropriate implementation theory and describe the synthesis and testing of the framework.

Abstract From the past few years in Sweden telecommunication business has been altered. Earlier when telecom industry was dominant in the market but now it is transformed in to more competitive market with further competitors and provides additional services. In Sweden TeliaSonera is one of the leading and superior telecommunication providers. Currently TeliaSonera is merged among two large companies such as Telia which was one of the outstanding telecommunication companies in all over Sweden and Sonera is the finish counterpart of Telia. TeliaSonera presently facilitate their customers as well as business customers by proving different communication services such as mobile telephony, mobile broadband, Broadband, fix telephony connection and TV. Regarding Customer support service the purpose of this study is to investigate the relationship among customers and telecommunication service providers, and in this study we emphasize on customer-support service concerning “The Role in Customer Relationships”. Our consideration is to find out the better relationship among telecommunication service providers and their customers. Additionally the role of Telia shop is also studied by taking interviews with Telia customer representative office (CRO) and Telia top management. Furthermore from theoretical perspective the research has been conducted through current literatures such as customer support service, relationship marketing, dominant logic, customer loyalty, complaining behavior and trigger model. Approximately all of the literatures are specify from customer viewpoint business processes intended for long lasting relationship. We have sufficient information concerning that how to get better and stand long lasting relationship with the customers in future. For the fruitful outcome we conducted this research by exploratory research method and also conducted interview with the help of open ended questionnaire and our target group was TeliasSonera Top management in Stockholm, manager of TeliaSonera shop in Karlstad city and also from 12 students of Karlstad University. The reason behind this was to know the role of TeliaSonera towards customer-support service as well as their customer experience and perception. Finally in the end we come up with the conclusion by the help of gathering qualitative information that the effective customer support-service can lead to long lasting relationship among customers and telecom sectors. Furthermore we also came to know in the end that superior quality customer support service assist to create more customers loyalty. That means customer-support service play one of the significant role between telecommunication service provider and customers. / LET-Project

No description available.

Abstract The aim of this study is to examine the relationship between customers and the telecommunication service provider regarding customer support service. The authors focus on customers support service as a tool of enhancing relationship between customers and telecommunication service provider and to come up with a “best practice” for the customer-support service in the telecom industry. The research has been conducted with recent relevant literature from academic viewpoint such as the relationship marketing, customer loyalty, customer dominant logic, customer support service and triggering factors for switching. After reviewing all of literatures authors have adequate knowledge how to enhance and sustain long term relationship with customers. Nearly every literature stipulates from customers perspective business operations for long term relationship. To accomplish research aim, authors conducted with an explorative research approach and with the help of a designed descriptive questionnaire which consist of seventeen close-ended and open-ended questions. The target group was sixteen master level students of Karlstad University who belong to nine different countries. From the interview, authors try to explore respondents’ experiences and acceptation from customer support service. Authors reached at the conclusion on the basis of collected qualitative information that the effective customer support service plays a vital role for enhancing the relationship between customers and telecom service providers. It is also evident throughout the research that the customer support service is the key link between the customer and the telecommunication service provider. / TeliaSonera

The study explores binary classification with Support Vector Machines as means to predict a satisfaction score based on customer surveys in the customer supportdomain. Standard feature selection methods and their impact on results are evaluated and a feature scoring metric Log Odds Ratio is implemented for addressingasymmetrical class distributions. Results show that the feature selection andscoring methods implemented improve performance significantly. Results alsoshow that it is possible to get decent predictive values on test data based onlimited amount of training observations. However mixed results are presentedin a real-world application example as a there is a significant error rate fordiscriminating the minority class. We also show the negative effects of usingcommon metrics such as accuracy and f-measure for optimizing models whendealing with high-skew data in a classification context.

Capacity planning is crucial for successful development of enterprise applications. Capacity planning activities are most consequential during the verification and maintenance phases of Software Development Life Cycle. During the verification phase, analysts need to execute a large number of performance tests to build accurate performance models. Performance models help customers in capacity planning for their deployments. To build valid performance models, the performance tests must be redone for every release or build of an application. This is a time-consuming and error-prone manual process, which needs tools and techniques to speed up the process. In the maintenance phase, when customers run into performance and capacity related issues after deployment, they commonly engage the vendor of the application for troubleshooting and fine tuning of the troubled deployments. At the end of the engagement, analysts create engagement report, which contain valuable information about the observed symptoms, attempted workarounds, identified problems, and the final solutions. Engagement reports are stored in a customer engagement repository. While information stored in the engagement reports is valuable in helping analysts with future engagements, no systematic techniques exist to retrieve relevant reports from such a repository. In this thesis we present a framework for the systematic and automated building of capacity calculators during software verification phase. Then, we present a technique to retrieve relevant reports from a customer engagement repository. Our technique helps analyst fix performance and capacity related issues in the maintenance phase by providing easy access to information from relevant reports. We demonstrate our contributions with case studies on an open-source benchmarking application and an enterprise application. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2009-01-29 14:14:37.235

Dans un contexte de croissance des tâches du client lors des expériences de service, cette thèse étudie qualitativement et quantitativement la relation entre l'aide au client, la motivation à participer et l'efficacité de la participation du client. La thèse adopte le point du prestataire de service. La partie qualitative se fonde sur deux études complémentaires, la première reposant sur les avis clients laissés en sortie de magasin, la deuxième sur l'analyse de parcours clients. La partie quantitative se déroule en deux temps. D'abord la relation entre l'aide au client (présence, nature, vecteur) et l'efficacité de la participation est testée lors d'une quasi-expérimentation en magasin sur 557 clients observés durant l'intégralité de leur parcours. Ensuite, lors d'une deuxième étude par scénario, les deux routes motivationnelles, émotionnelle et rationnelle, sont considérées afin de comprendre comment l'aide au client accroît l'efficacité de la participation.Les apports de cette recherche sont méthodologiques et théoriques. L'efficacité de la participation du client est mesurée en observant le comportement réel du client en magasin et non par une phase déclarative, développant ainsi une méthodologie spécifique pour étudier le concept de participation. Les résultats montrent que la présence d'une aide accroît l'efficacité de la participation du client et que les émotions constituent une route motivationnelle véhiculant l'influence de l'aide au client sur l'efficacité de la participation. Ces apports permettent d'envisager la mise en place d'actions managériales permettant d'accroître l'efficacité et l'autonomie du client lors de l'expérience de service. / Today, companies require a higher customer participation in service experiences. This research aims at studying the relationship between customer support, motivation to participate and customer productivity from the company point of view, through qualitative and quantitative studies. The qualitative research is founded on two complementary studies: the first one is based on customer comments in store, the second one on the customer journey analysis. The quantitative research is subdivided in two parts. First, the relationship between customer support (availability, nature and medium) and customer productivity is analyzed through the observation of 557 customer journeys. Then, the influence of motivation paths (emotions and rational motivation) are studied in a scenario based study in order to consider how customer support increases customer productivity.Research contributions are methodological and theoretical. This research brings a new methodology to study participation: the customer productivity is measured through the observation of customer real behavior and not through a declarative process. On a theoretical perspective, the customer support availability increases customer productivity and the emotions are a way to motivate customers to participate. These contributions lead companies to implement new processes to increase customer productivity and self-service activities during the service experience.

In today’s business climate many organizations are implementing ERP systems to connect all their processes into one system thereby hoping to benefit off the resulting efficiencies. ERP Vendors are trying to best cater to the needs of their customers, and this extends into the post-implementation period where customers rely on the Vendor to resolve software and technical errors that inevitably occur. This study looks into a factor with-in this area from the ERP Vendor perspective. Customers have to communicate with their ERP Vendor in the post-implementation period to resolve problems, and this study focuses on how this could best happen. This study uses a single case study approach that is centered on an ERP Vendor’s Customer support team. This Vendor has identified a requirement of getting a new and improved customer support e-system. This study will investigate for them, and other ERP Vendors in similar situations, what factors should influence this decision. To find the influential factors for the ERP Vendor’s requirement, the study looks into the available literature concerning ERP and IT support, and then survey’s the customer support team for further data. Part of the survey is based on a pre-existing study regarding the measurement of customer system effectiveness. And then qualitative responses from the support team are also analyzed. This study has brought to light many influential factors for ERP Vendors to take into consideration to have an effective customer support e-system. While all the factors can be taken into consideration in varying degrees, this study concludes that the most important center on and around providing Self Service Support (SSS). And then with-in the e-system, the Vendor must ensure an alignment to their and customer processes, while maintaining clear and logical access to quality information.