Self-service reservation in the fieldforce |
| |
Authors: | Y Li C Voudouris S G Thompson G Owusu G Anim-Ansah A Liret H Lee M Kern |
| |
Institution: | (1) Seidman School Of Business, Grand Valley State University, DeVos Hall, Suite 454C, 401 W. Fulton, Grand Rapids, MI 49546, USA |
| |
Abstract: | On-line service reservation is becoming increasingly popular in the service industry. As services become more complex, requiring
co-ordination among individual actions, the planning for making service appointments is normally conducted manually by the
operators, often resulting in slow responses to customers.
To tackle this problem, we have developed a real-time service reservation portal that takes an order from a user and works
out appointment options, based on the availability of enterprise resources, for the user to book on-line. The portal is capable
of dealing with complex workflow appointing, supporting interactive fine-tuning in individual appointments, respecting customer
preferences and work policies, monitoring progress of workflow, informing the customer of status changes in job scheduling,
dispatching and execution, as well as handling exceptions automatically.
We have integrated the portal, code-named FieldReserve, with other components in the BT fieldforce optimisation suite (FOS)
that covers functions of resource planning, scheduling and execution for the fieldforce to demonstrate the feasibility and
potential benefits of this technology. Benefits demonstrated are to provide customers with instant response of service reservation,
to provide volume control on reservation, to break away from one-size-fits-all lead times for service fulfilment, to provide
customers with equal access to service provision, and to bring transparency of service progress to customers. Currently, we
are actively engaging with businesses and have obtained strong support to downstream the key values of this technology in
commercial contexts. |
| |
Keywords: | |
本文献已被 SpringerLink 等数据库收录! |
|