SCM — A simple, modular and flexible customer interaction management system

SCM is a simple, modular and flexible system for web monitoring and customer interaction management. In our view, its main advantages are the following: It is completely web based. It combines all technologies, data, software agents and human agents involved in the monitoring and customer interaction process. It can be used for messages written in any natural language. Although the prototype of SCM is designed for classifying and processing messages about mobile-phone related problems in social networks, SCM can easily be adapted to other text types such as discussion board posts, blogs or emails. Unlike comparable systems, SCM uses linguistic technologies to classify messages and recognize paraphrases of product names. For two reasons, product name paraphrasing plays a major role in SCM: First, product names typically have many, sometimes hundreds or thousands of intralingual paraphrases. Secondly, product names have interlingual paraphrases: The same products are often called or spelt differently in different countries and/or languages. By mapping product name variants to an international canonical form, SCM allows for answering questions like Which statements are made about this mobile phone in which languages/in which social networks/in which countries/…? The SCM product name paraphrasing engine is designed in such a way that standard variants are assigned automatically, regular variants are assigned semiautomatically and idiosyncratic variants can be added manually. With this and similar features we try to realize our philosophy of simplicity, modularity and flexibility: Whatever can be done automatically is done automatically. But manual intervention is always possible and easy and it does not conflict in any way with the automatic functions of SCM.