Soft Computing in the Service Industry

Service industries have recently witnessed several innovations, one of which is the widespread use of contact centres in the front of customer service management. Service encounters based on contact centres have raised new issues about the management of services. Customer contact centres allow a company to build, maintain, and manage customer relationships by solving problems and resolving complaints quickly, having information, answering questions, and being available usually 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days of the year (Prabhaker, Sheehan and Coppett, 1997). Application of the technologies involved in contact center operations can play a key role in accessing more customers, and in providing better quality services especially where additional or extended services become available. It is necessary to understand individual customers from all levels to enable the advisor to help them more efficiently and thus providing better customer satisfaction. Within the current CCC environment there is a problem of high staff turnover and lack of suitably trained staff at the right place for the right kind of customer. Thus from a business point of view any available advisor should be able to handle a customer with consistent and good quality service (Azarmi, et al., 1998). There is also a shortage of good quality skilled staff due to retention problem that exists within current environment. This is supported by Doganis et al., (2005) who state “due to strong competition that exists today, most manufacturing organisations are in a continuous effort for increasing their profits and reducing their costs”. More and more effort is going into customer behaviour modelling and customer retention in a bid to prevent valuable customers from moving to competing companies. This section will discuss the identified research and progress that has been made in the ongoing process of improving company’s business strategies using soft computing techn