Abstract
In today’s e-business environment, companies cannot survive by only differentiating their products and services from competitors. With the product life cycle becoming shorter and shorter; almost all competitors can produce similar products with similar functionality, Thus service quality and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) become essential to make a difference and to provide a company with advantage in the open market, and call centers are the most important tools to build and maintain the relationship with customers. Call Centers need more features to handle today’s customer demands. This research considers the web-based means for interacting with customers and publics. The thesis will cover the issues such as how a web-based call center (WBCC) be built so that it can perform as well as a traditional phone-based call center. The advantages of Internet utilization for developing more powerful call center are also studied. This research will select an industrial sector as scenario to develop a prototype on the Internet. The functions of the WEBCC prototype include the real-time interaction, E-Mail analysis, FAQs, dynamistic distribution of incoming connection and historical interaction record storage. Finally, this research will demonstrate the feasibility and the importance of the web-based call center and also derive the principals and methods for developing a web based call center. 1.1. RESEARCH MOTIVE 1.2. RESEARCH PURPOSE 1.3. THESIS ORGANIZATION 2. BACKGROUND 2.1. THE EVOLUTION OF E-COMMERCE 2.2. AN OVERVIEW OF CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENT 2.2.1. Defining CRM 2.2.2. E-commerce and CRM 2.3. BUILDING A CALL CENTER 2.3.1. The Architecture of Call Centers 2.3.2. The Evolution of Call Centers 2.4. DEFINING THE INTERNET 3. CALL CENTER FUNCTIONS AND PROCESS ANALYSIS 3.1. CALL CENTER FUNCTIONS 3.2. CALL CENTERS ON THE INTERNET 4. FINANCIAL SERVICE CASE 4.1. SCENARIO INTRODUCTION 4.2. AN OVERVIEW OF BUSINESS PROCESSES 4.3. PROCESSES ON THE INTERNET 4.4. COMPARISON 5. SYSTEM IMPLEMENTATION AND EXTENSION 5.1. SYSTEM INFRASTRUCTURE AND ENVIRONMENT REQUIREMENT 5.2. WEB BASED CALL CENTER PROTOTYPES AND PROCESSES 5.2.1. Front-End Application Implementation 5.2.2. Back-End Application Implementation 5.3. EVALUATION METHODS 5.4. APPLICATION TO OTHER BUSINESS CASES 5.5. MULTIMEDIA INTERACTION 6. CONCLUSIONS 7. REFERENCES APPENDIX