Design of Web-Based Customer Relation Management Application for Power Distribution Company: A Case Study of PHCN Owerri Business Unit

Abstract

In this paper, the design of web-based customer care application for power distribution company is presented with Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) Owerri business unit as the case study. The system is developed to address the problems of poor customer services experienced due to the manual approach that has been used by PHCN. The system provided web-based volunteered information system for capturing, sorting and disseminating customers’ information, as well as for attending to customers’ complaints and bill payments. Furthermore, a mapping functionality is included to enable the system to capture and process spatial information of the customers and PHCN facilities. A modified waterfall methodology is adopted in the web application development. The activities involve in the modified waterfall model includes requirement engineering, planning, designing, coding, testing integration and deployment. The web application is implemented using PHP as the server side scripting language, Java for the client side scripting language, MYSQL for the database management system and it is hosted locally using Apache web server. Equally, a third party web map application is interfaced based on Google map application program interface (API version 3). Sample data are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the customer care and customer cum facility mapping system.

Keywords

• Waterfall Methodology
• Web Application
• Customer Relationship Management
• Volunteered Information System
• Database, Scripting Language
• Map Application Program Interface