Field-level customer support decision model for high-tech products in India

Product support offers competitive differentiation for high-tech products in developing markets like India. Highly fluctuating number of daily customer field-service requests mandate 'optimal field staffing decision'. Despite an operational decision, it assumes strategic significance influencing long run customer service level. Companies decide on the field staff strength (fixed and outsourced) to comply with the fluctuating field service demand. This study models a real-time customer support system featuring restricted daily working hours and decision making epochs. The study assesses the daily field service demand based on the cumulative sales developing a methodology. Study uses stochastic principles to derive mathematical expressions for average customer waiting time and cost of customer service in a service system with decision-making epochs. Real time data that validates model shows that customer waiting time minimises with increased number of decision epochs without affecting the cost of service. Copyright © 2007 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.