Future customer service for factoring business services

Abstract

The thesis was carried out for a financing company X that is offering different financial services and is based in Finland. In the following text will be referred as ‘’financing company’’. The goal of this thesis study was to do research on factoring services that are offered for the buyer customers by the financing company. The results of the research will be used for developing the factoring services that the co-operation partner is offering.

The theoretical framework of the thesis consisted of; factoring, product development, user- orientated product development, competitor analysis, customer service, customer relationship management and customer expectations. The theoretical framework focuses on customer service and customer relationship management as those are a big part of the factoring business services that the financing company is offering for the buyer customers.

The practical implementation of the thesis consisted of a survey that was carried out electronically. The survey was selected as the research method for the thesis because it was the best way to reach out to a lot people and also to gain in-depth data from the target group that could be used in the development of the factoring business services for the financing company. The survey that was made for the research was based on three topics, that we focused on. We wanted to find out at a general level how factoring is perceived by buyer customers. The second thing was to find out on at a more practical level as to which things are working out well for the buyer customers and which are causing problems for them. The third topic that we focused on in the survey was how the financing company compares to competitors that are also offering factoring services.

Within the results of this survey, the relevant themes that came up were: information flow, payment reminders, interest invoices, network system for open invoices and customer service’s response time. The conclusions of the results included a comprehensive overview of all the three topics that we had focused on in the research. Based on the results and conclusions, development suggestions were provided that included ways of reducing customer service’s response time, suggestion of network system for open invoices, ways to mitigate problem areas and suggestions for managing the process that could help the financing company to meet the customer expectations.