Assume you are a customer service representative for a manufacturer of consumer electronics. What customer information would the CRM system need to supply to provide the best possible customer service? For each piece of information, describe how it could be obtained.

 

Campus Travel has recently started selling products on the Internet; the managers are eager to know how the company’s Web site is accepted by the customers. The file CampusTravel.csv contains transaction information for the past three days, generated from the company’s Web server, including IP addresses of the visitors, whether a transaction was completed, and the transaction amount. You are asked to present the current status of the e-commerce initiative. Use your spreadsheet program to prepare the following graphs:

â–  A graph highlighting the total number of site visits and the total number of transactions per day

■ A graph highlighting the total sales per day Make sure to format the graphs in a professional manner, including headers, footers, and the appropriate labels, and print each graph on a separate page. (Hint: To calculate the total number of site visits and the total number of transactions, use the “countif” function to count the number.)

 

Describe your experiences with information systems that were undergoing changes or updates. What kind of conversion procedure was being used? How did this affect your interaction with the system as a user? Who else was affected? If the system was down altogether, for how long was it down? Do you or any of your classmates have horror stories, or were the situations not that bad?

 

Find an organization on the Internet (e.g., at www .computerworld.com or www.infoworld.com) or a company you may want to work for in the future that outsources work. What are the managerial challenges of outsourcing, and why is this a popular alternative to hiring additional staff?