Page 173 - DMGT308_CUSTOMER_RELATIONSHIP_MANAGEMENT

Customer Relationship Management

Notes After Flatworld’s pilot, the initial market scope extended from the USA to cover the UK,
Canada and Anglophone Africa. Extensions were not only in business divisions, products
and market scope but also in budgets. The marked increase in productivity of the in-
market sales team resulted in the extension of budgets as well.
Customer Response

The customer remarked that the call centre offshore outsourcing deal they got from
Flatworld was extremely successful, as the results from the pilot paid for Flatworld’s
subsequent quarterly service fees!
The customer thought it was important to build a team rapport across customer and
service provider. They made it mandatory for the in-market sales team to visit the
development centre in India and our sales support team and interact on a more personal
level.

The customer also expressed that the company strategy to differentiate itself from
competitors in terms of the quality of staff deployed in its initial customer facing interaction
and solution development was a success.
Questions:
1. Analyse the case and present your observation.
2. Were the strategies opted by Flatworld’s appropriate?

Source: http://www.flatworldsolutions.com/success-stories/call-center/callcenter-offshore-
outsourcing.php

6.4 Summary

 The front office is the client-facing part of the firm and includes the roles which focus on
working with and for clients, rather than in support, risk, compliance and operations
roles. It is named because traditionally, the client-facing staff would be at the front of the
business where they could be seen, and the support staff would be behind them at the
back, unseen.
 Usually, front office roles are income generating and therefore some people argue that
roles such as Equity Research are not front office, as they do not directly generate any
revenue although this is clearly wrong, as they are perhaps the most client-facing role
there is alongside Sales. On the other hand, traders almost never meet clients so they
might not be considered front office, when they most definitely are.

 Often, people get too focused on whether a role is “front office” or not and there is
confusion over what is front office and what inst, as the examples above demonstrate.
Front office roles can be thought of as the intermediary roles, both between clients and
between outside and inside roles. For example, two buy-side firms might interact through
the Sales force at an investment bank, and front office bankers interact with both clients
and support staff and therefore facilitate the flow of information.
 Typically, the front office is the hardest area of an investment bank to get into, but also has
the best pay and exit opportunities.
 Historically, call centres have been built on PBX equipment that is owned and hosted by
the call centre operator. The PBX might provide functions such as Automatic Call
Distribution, Interactive Voice Response, and skills-based routing. The call centre operator
would be responsible for the maintenance of the equipment and necessary software
upgrades as released by the vendor.

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