DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION OF AN ONLINE COMPLAINT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

CHAPTER ONE

1.1 INTRODUCTION

BACKGROUND TO THE STUDY

Establishments like IT firm, school, hospitals, government secretarial, financial institutions etc. which have large numbers of customers or client received enormous amount of complaints per day, and these complain has to be documented and filed for access and stored for future reference. A complaint system (also known as a conflict management system, internal conflict management system, integrated conflict management system, or dispute system) is a set of procedures used in organizations to address complaints and resolve disputes.

Marchington and Wilkinson (2005) defined method of handling complaint as a product of labor relations environment in the 60s and 70s when there was a more explicit struggle for control in the workplace. This had two main effects. Firstly, it created the requirement for clear techniques so that all specialists knew and decides that oversee implicit rules, and moves that may be made against them if these guidelines were charged. Besides, it prompted more prominent clarity and consistency of executive activities to determination the protests.

 Design and implementation of complaint management system is to maintain an effective, timely, and equitable complaint handling system which is easily accessible and offered to complainants (customers) at no charge. This project defines the policy and steps for handling and resolving complaints and also to appeal for an un-favored situation and for this process to take place there must be an automation of the system that will be handle the complaints process and appeal method of registration. Automation can be defined as the aspects involved in using a computer system for the tasks or process such as circulation, implementation etc.  It is possible for the design and implementation of an online complaint management system to yield L: substantial benefits for the users. Chapter one introduces the research work and the problem definition of the research, and to know the aim of this research work, research justification tells us why it is important to research on this topic; it also covers areas like scope and limitation of study which entails the boundary of this work. This issue had created a lot of problems for an organization growth in the various aspects of the complaint system. To support this approach, this project identifies a range of options that can be used to manage and resolve online complain. This includes, where the opportunity presents itself, the need for administrator to make every effort to resolve potential or actual online complaint as informally as possible in the first instance.

1.2 AIM AND OBJECTIVE OF STUDY

This project is aimed at implementing a complaint management system which will be having the underlisted objectives

·         Receive daily complain from customer.

·         Allow customer to registered and obtain username and password to login into the system and lodge in their complain and view previous complain.

·         To provide a medium through which authorize personnel can attend to those complain from customers from any location.

·         Simultaneously update changes made to any data, item in the entire database.

1.3 STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

This research work was undertaken to uncover the various problems with conventional complaint management system. These include;

·         Incomprehensive complaints history.

·         Inconsistency in customer interaction.

·         Lack of prompt updating as to when a complaint issues has been resolved.

·         Lack of legitimate precise, concise data about the customer implicit rules and character.

1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS

This research work “design and implementation of an interactive complaint management system for organizations” the system will be a web-based application and will be implemented on a relational database system (MySQL). HTML (hypertext markup language), CSS (cascading style sheet) and JavaScript will be used to design the web-user interface; PHP (hypertext preprocessor) will be used as the serve-side script language to link the interface and the database.

1.5 SIGNIFICANCE OF THE STUDY

The significance of this study is to serve better than the existing system which is highly manual and therefore difficult in terms of monitoring the complaint, it improve database and enhance effectiveness, efficiency and security of the system. It is also intended that the study will help in the development of a new and hopefully and standard better computer aided system.

The new system will save time, reduceimproper handling of complaint system and also improve relationship between customer, staff and management.

The system is expected to be easy as customer can login their complaint anytime, staff and management also can equally response to online complaint in a more easy way and reduced turnaround time in responding to customers issues.

1.6 SCOPE OF THE STUDY

It can be used by any IT firm, Government secretariat, Law firm, SMEs, Health establishment, Media firms and financial institutions like banks. To manage client complaint and improve customer relationship. This research work is limited by time constraints and unavailability of resources. Design to help client login their complaint and request for management helps concern any complaints.

1.7       Research Approach and Methodology

            The main research methods used in this research are mostly qualitative: focus of this study relates strongly to business excellence and development. Methods reviewed are linked to process thinking and continuous improvement together with problem solving.

Personnel interviews and discussion are the main source of gleaning empirical data.

General process orientation and overview are absorbed in form of given topic interviews. During the actual interface development process, continuous feedback will be collected. In addition, propositions and solutions are exhaustively discussed using a peer and/or management review.

Due to the limited period of time, the study is carried out from only one team’s point of view. On a more global level, the procurement team is responsible for supplier management and processes related (e.g. claim management). To narrow down the research scope even further, this study only concentrates on certain types of claims leaving for example warranty issues outside the scope.

1.8 DEFINITION OF TERMS

DATABASE: an organized collection of data that is stored in computer and can be accessed and used in various ways.

RELATIONAL DATABASE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM: it uses relation or two dimensional tables to store information.

MYSQL: it is English like database query language used for retrieving and managing data in a relational database management system, it is a query language for querying and modifying data and managing databases.

PHP: originally stood for personal homepage currently, it is known as hypertext preprocessor widely used as a general purpose server-side scripting language that was originally designed for developing dynamic web pages.

HTML: (Hypertext markup language) is the set of markup symbols or codes inserted in a file intended for display on a World Wide Web browser page.

CASCADING STYLE SHEETS: (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language.css is a cornerstone technology used by most websites to create visually engaging webpages, user interfaces for web applications.

JAVA SCRIPT: is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. In script languages it is easier and faster to code in than the more structured and complied languages such as C and C++…