The Customer Service Management Process

Customer service management is the supply chain management process that represents the firm's face to the customer. The process is the key point of contact for administering product and service agreements (PSAs) developed by customer teams as part of the customer relationship management process. The goal is to provide a single source of customer information, such as product availability, shipping dates and order status. Customer service management requires a real‐time system to respond to customer inquiries and facilitate order placement. In this paper, we describe the customer service management process in detail to demonstrate how it can be implemented and managed. To do this, we detail the activities of each strategic and operational sub‐process; evaluate the interfaces with the business functions, the other seven supply chain management processes; and describe examples of successful implementation.