Information Systems Analysis and Design

 Getting the Customer Service Project Approved Last week, you, as IS Manager, presented to the CIO of your company a report analyzing the style of implementation to be used in a new information system dealing with the handling of customer service. The CIO went to the top-level Steering Committee of the company armed with your report, and the Committee decided to select the SaaS (“software as a service”) style of implementation. The specific SaaS style to use would be cloud-based and multi-tenant. Even though the Steering Committee approved the style of implementation, the project itself is far from approved. Your job this week is to prepare a complete financial analysis of the project so that the CIO can present it to the Steering Committee and gain approval for going ahead with the project. The CIO informed you that in this meeting of the Committee all pending projects for the company, including those for manufacturing, sales, marketing, and all other areas of the company will be analyzed and approved, postponed, or rejected. This means that your IS project will compete head to head with projects with a direct and measurable positive impact on the company’s revenue and profits. After some moments of reflection, you realize that the measurable financial benefits of your project will be essential in getting it approved and march off to your office to think and write. After consulting with the Customer Service Manager, you pulled the following data related to their area (for background information in these metrics, just Google [customer service metrics] and check one of the articles that will be found, such as Burke, 2015). Average open cases (waiting for a response) = 360 Average number of activities to resolve a case = 2.1 Average time to resolve a case = 6.1 minutes Average first response time = 3.4 minutes Average resolution rate (resolved / total cases) = 95.3% Average backlog (cases opened / cases closed) = 1.54 Average churn rate (% customers lost) = 7.1% Average customer satisfaction (1 – 10) = 8.5 Average cost per case (resolved) = $3.15 Average cost per case (not resolved but closed) = $9.74. Top management is not happy with these numbers, and the justification of the new system hinges on improving these metrics. In particular, the churn rate is abysmal, in their opinion, and must be improved to under 1% (“Churn” measures the percentage of customers lost due to unfortunate customer support experiences.) In addition to these numbers, you also have the projected costs of the SaaS solution: Number of customer service system users: 15 Cost per user per month (billed annually): $150 Additional infrastructure costs: negligible Training per user (one-time cost): $0 plus employee salary. Using your knowledge of the company, your imagination, and consultations with your friend, the CFO of the organization, you come up with a report with at least 900 words and you organize it with the following section subtitles (plus proper introduction and conclusion paragraphs):