The population of interest is the clientele of FairIsaac Corporation. FairIsaac works with hundreds of companies worldwide. The client base range includes financial services, insurance, retail, telecommunication and utilities, healthcare and pharmaceuticals. There are 400 personal and commercial lines insurers. There are more than 150 retailers such as DSW Shoe Warehouse and Enterprise Rent-A-Car. FairIsaac serve ore than 100 telecommunications providers such as AT&T Wireless and Nextel Communications.
The technology that FairIsaac offers helps clientele base to grow. In the healthcare and pharmaceutical field, the millions of yearly claims is evidence of a portion of clients. The constant incoming calls and questions to the technical support team is the sole reason for such a dense population of interest. The support staff has immediate duty to respond as accurate as possible to concerns.
Independent Variables The Mortgage Ordinations support group was a department of seven IT professional that were reduced to four people. Presently, the remaining three IT support staff members cannot handle the influx of calls and emails adequately. Under legacy London Bridge, the response time was much shorter and better executed. Grumblings and complaints from all existing customers are starting to mount, and dissatisfied customers are being a common practice. Support staff employees are increasingly working between 50-60 hours and are becoming frustrated with their jobs.
Dependent Variables A month later another support staff member left the company, leaving the department with three full-time people supporting five extensive originations products. FairIsaac management insists upon applying different internal strategies to remedy the situation in the face of a company-hiring freeze. As a result to the COO suggests that management supply them with a detailed metric table and breakdown of all the components that make up the support staff responsibility. If the interim to figure out if there is fact some more staff members that would be needed to improve on the quality of customer satisfaction.
Hypothesis A streamline support staff would help Fair Isaac’s technical support team. It is designed to provide clients with a single point of contact within Fair Isaac for resolving system issues, tracking bugs or submitting product enhancement requests. This eliminates the need for one to locate the resources within Fair Isaac that can best resolve your specific system problem. Support engineers may involve developers or Professional Services specialists in the resolution process, but still retain ownership of the incident. FairIsaac closely monitors the response and resolution timeframes, and have established a formal internal engagement and escalation process to ensure visibility and appropriate commitment of resources to incident resolution.www.fairisaac.com.
Fair Isaac’s goal for responding to an incident and providing an action plan for its resolution depends on the severity of the problem. An incident is typically handled as follows:
The number of hours it will take to resolve a problem is based on a series of variables including the complexity of the problem, severity level of the incident and the environment in which the problem occurred. The quality and timeliness of the information provided by the client also affects the speed at which issues are concluded. To expedite the process of resolving problems with our licensed software, we typically interact with a “designated user” at each client site. FairIsaac also recommend that the client complete an Incident Form prior to contacting the Product Support team. This helps the client prepare for the call by gathering as much relevant information as possible www.fairisaac.com.
Supportive Theory to Hypothesis To support the hypothesis that a streamlined support staff can handle the necessary demands of incoming inquiries can be summarized by a number of factors. Realignment meant assembling the best practices and systems that were implemented throughout legacy London-Bridge organization and integrate those business units into one set of “best practices” that uses the entire company. By carefully crafting a standard set of best practices and systems, FairIsaac is confident that the employees are positioned to work at an optimal level using minimal resources (Sledgianowski & Luftman, 2005). Identifying and implementing best practices should increase efficiency by streamlining and simplifying processes organization-wide (Sledgianowski & Luftman, 2005).
The new product offerings across the FairIsaac lines of business are increasingly changing and making uses of new technology every year. The knowledge required to support these new business applications across all lines will require an individual with a vast amount of technical, industry and business application exposure. Such an individual is difficult to locate, but with an education and training budget largely untapped for employee development, replacing an existing employee should not be very difficult. Additionally, new tracking tools can assist with prioritizing severity levels and managing ongoing projects seamlessly without oversight from the PSE.
With the goal of restructuring to simplify and centralize processes, it soon became apparent that customer satisfaction was a key component towards achieving the overall FairIsaac business strategy. Jean Felder, who is the CFO of a specialty chemical company that is currently engaged in vertical integration of business units says, ” we can change the structure all we want, but if we can’t properly leverage IT to help coordinate and control the new streamlined structure, then our decision-making capability is not going to get any faster” (Sledgianowski & Luftman, 2005). FairIsaac in the coming months will need to further implement more business related metrics (i.e. user satisfaction, IT’s responsiveness, computer response time, etc) with its existing clients to get a feel for what the consensus about the support staff. Sharing of the knowledge gained with business partners and employees alike will help measure quality and contribution to profits.
Methodology Used The research method used was that of action research. The research involved collecting participant observation data and documents to understand and explain the problematic situation with FairIsaac Corporation. Small questionnaires and interviews with clients will be used to find out which tools, support structures, and manuals function best and what changes are needed. Analysis of employee production will be carried out by looking closely to the individual performance. Throughout the use of questionnaires, internet resources, and book research, an overall view of FairIsaac Company acquisition will be analyzed.
References
Currie, Wendy. 2000. The supply side of IT: the trend towards mergers, acquisitions and joint ventures. International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 30(3/4), 238-254. Retrieved from ProQuest Database.
