Risks and rewards at Frontier communications: improving customer service using client/server technology

Abstract

Frontier Communications provides a variety of telecommunications services to business customers around the United States. The telecommunications industry is fiercely competitive, with suppliers constantly seeking to improve their market share. Maintaining good relationships with business customers is very important, since they can easily change from one carrier to another and still receive the same basic communications products. Frontier considers customer service to be one of the firm’s most critical functions. Customers with questions or complaints interact with Frontier’s customer service representatives (CSRs). CSRs’ tasks vary considerably depending on the situation, but they always strive to give customers an immediate and appropriate response to their inquiries. Achieving this goal requires that CSRs have access to a wide variety of customer information. Allnet Communications, acquired by Frontier Communications in 1995, had developed a sophisticated mainframe-based system to support its CSRs. Although the system provided most of the data CSRs needed, it was not flexible enough to help them (1) get a complete picture of customers’ activities, (2) research a problem and evaluate potential solutions, and (3) identify sales opportunities. Allnet’s management information systems (MIS) group developed a graphical user interface (GUI)-based customer service workstation. Significant effort was devoted to understanding the tasks Risks and Rewards at Frontier Communications: Improving Customer Service Using Client/Server Technology