Summary
Brennan, the CEO and the chairman of Vanguard, initiated a joint force in the development of a massive integration project of a single web portal that was meant to replace siloed systems and databases. This project was motivated by the need to give customers an excellent and seamless service.
After the development of the Vanguard web in 1998, customers were able to use the web to do a number of activities which included opening of new accounts, purchase and redemption of shares. These services made most customers shift to the web in managing their portfolios. Currently, the Vanguard website investor’s invest more as compared to those customers who are not online and the cost of serving the online customers is low (Anon, N.d).
After sometime, during the use of the Vanguard website, the managing director noted a problem with the employees web interface and proposed the employees use the same web interface with the customers. The use of the same web interface between the customers and the employees produced good results in the seamless customer service and the channel parity. This was then enhanced with the automatic system which required little human intervention. The use of the same interfaces, both internally and externally, made it possible for the client and the crew members to be on the same foothold in their operations. These developments made the employees to have more time to concentrate on investment issues.
The use of web interface in the corporate portal changed the need to train the customer because the interface developed was intuitive. This gave the staff more time to train their clients on investment. The systems also helped Vanguard to handle many customer calls and improve its services.
The employees’ interface developed was simplified such that the employees used a summary of customer’s transactions and the tools which fed the employees with required information and services needed by a given customer. This made the life of employees easier and their work simplified. The Vanguard.com interface was then expanded through buying and integrating the third-party CRM system, a thing that turned the confirmation page into power user page, and this simplified the internal system maintenance (Anon, N.d).
The most important benefit that accrues from using web interface is the straight – through processing which is built on vanguard.com. To enhance these benefits, the Buckey’s team developed tools that had standard rules at the point of data entry; this was inline with expanding the Vanguard.com site. This enabled the data entered by employees to go straight through instead of triggering a manual process. This process reduces the cost of labor making it a cheap way to conduct business.
Vanguard team introduced the transaction capability on Vanguard.com, which was the beginning of the company enterprise data base. This enabled the customer data to be stored in 10 different points. This enabled the IT team to create a comprehensive customer data base (Anon, N.d).
Statement of the problem
The problem facing Vanguard team is gauging the financial viability of current investment project meant to improve the customer service, which is said to be costly and may affect the viability of the company financially.
Solution
The company needs to undertake a cost benefit analysis before investing much on the project and this will prove the viability of the project to the organization.
This kind of solution will work because it will enable the manager to gauge the various options available in that kind of project and also list the impediments that the project is likely to face in its implementation (Riley, 2006).
Reference List
Anon. (N.d). All for One View. M626 case study week 3
Riley, G. (2006). Cost Benefit Analysis. Web.