A Development Framework for Customer Experience Management Applications: Principles and Case Study

Customer experience management (CEM) denotes a set of practices, processes, and tools that aim to personalize a customer's interactions with a company around the customer's needs and desires. This personalization depends on the purchase scenario at hand, and on how much a company knows about its customers. In turn, the purchase scenario depends, among other things, on the complexity of the product or service being offered (e.g., a carton of milk versus a house), and the complex set of motivations that can trigger a purchasing process. E-commerce software tool vendors need to provide the building blocks that enable retailers to configure and develop CEM functionalities that take into account these factors. In earlier work, we proposed such building blocks within the context of a CEM development framework that relies on a cognitive modeling of the purchasing process and identifies the touch points between seller and buyer and relevant influence factors. We envision a CEM scenario specification tool that enables business analysts to specify their purchase scenario, from which we generate data structures and algorithms to implement CEM functionalities by instantiating the framework. The framework is embodied in a set of ontologies and algorithm templates that can be instantiated with the specification parameters. In this paper, we present the principles behind our approach, and a prototype CEM scenario specification tool. We illustrate the tool with a moderately complex purchasing scenario, to validate the underlying theory, and to explore implementation strategies