Case Study 1: One- to- One with ServiceWare Customers

A conversation with David Breit, director of customer service technology for Marconi, about knowledge management, self- help and creating a service- oriented corporate culture.

With roots in the work of the Nobel Prize winner and wireless communications pioneer, Guglielmo Marconi, Marconi plc is one of the world’s fastest growing communications and IT companies. Before becoming Marconi in November 1999, the company was known as GEC (The General Electric Company, plc). Today, the company is comprised of a wide range of organisations including Marconi Communications, providing highperformance broadband solutions for the New Public Network and Modern Enterprise; Marconi Services, facilitating network planning, building, and operation; Marconi Mobile, providing private mobile and strategic communications solutions; and Marconi Systems, offering advanced electronic and information technology solutions for customers in more than 100 countries including various industries. Marconi is a global-leader in smart broadband optical networks, ATM backbone switches, telephony products, wireless products, medical imaging and more.

Organisations are moving to a 24/7/365 e- business model. In this nonstop environment, the quality of the customer or end- user experience is key to maintaining market and mindshare in the new economy.

Enterprise executives who recognise this new business paradigm and who are willing to commit their organisations to a process aimed at embracing this reality will gain a tremendous advantage from deploying knowledge management systems and technologies. By building on their organisations’ customer support experiences and by making the most out of their current investments in support staff, these enterprises can gradually move from seeing customer support as a costly and reluctant overhead to recognising it as a business advantage.

KM technology holds the key to capturing the most precious of all business commodities— it’s workers’ knowledge. Turning that knowledge into a dynamic, re-usable resource that is always improving in value provides a level of customer satisfaction that is unsurpassable in today’s competitive e-business world.