OREANDA-NEWS. September 11, 2014. POSCO launched a Customer Appointment Management System in a bid to further strengthen the marketing competitiveness it has built up in terms of speed of execution by ensuring a prompt on-the-spot response to customer requests.

Work on the system, which was developed in collaboration between POSCO`s Information Infrastructure Implementation Team and Steelmaking Business Support Group, was given the go-ahead in light of management awareness that the changes seen in the steel marketing landscape called for a corresponding change in the way business organizations respond to customers.

The Customer Appointment Management System enables enterprise-level communication and collaboration, such that all employees - from front-line marketing workers to steel mill engineers and laboratory researchers – are now able to work with each other in time. This marks a sea change from what went before, when marketing workers had to contact employees in other teams over the phone or by e-mail in order to be able to provide customers with the answers they sought. The slowdown in communication made it difficult to promise a customer that they would have an answer to their question by a specific time. Marketing workers found they had to check the progress of each case meticulously and on an ongoing basis.

The new system, which was introduced to solve such issues, is designed to cut such inefficiencies in business processes. Simple inquiries about price or delivery turnaround time are immediately responded to, while inquiries requiring collaboration and discussion among different departments are posted to the system, and a reply is expected to be given to the customer within three days.

Furthermore, the entire process from the receipt of the customer request through to the inter-departmental collaboration and feedback collection is monitored and conducted on a digital platform. The benefits of this approach are that it cuts out latent inefficiencies in business processes and, ultimately, expedites operations.

POSCO has distributed and utilized Smart Note, its in-house, differentiated sales support system designed specifically to facilitate customer care on the spot since January. Smart Note is a mobile system configured to allow marketing staff members to access generic features such as memo, mail, POWIS and basic marketing functions regarding shipping, order, and price on a mobile platform that is as manageable as their own notepads. The Customer Appointment Management System fits within Smart Note to allow all POSCO employees to access it, regardless of whether they are in or out of the office.

The Steel Solution Center of the Steel Business Division set up a three-month pilot to identify success cases that could be used to situate `marketing-EVI-service-research` within a holistic whole. Going forward, it is planning to rollout the solution across the entire organization.