An object-oriented analysis method for customer relationship management information systems

For the advances of Internet technologies in recent years, Electronic Commerce (EC) has gained many attentions as a major theme for enterprises to keep their competitiveness. Amongst all possibly desired endeavors for the EC, research has shown that effective management of customer relationships is a major source for keeping competitive differentiation. Therefore, it is commonly recognized as an important coal for an enterprise to promote its management of customer relationships through a prospect information system on the Internet to achieve the so-called Business-to-Customer EC. In this paper, we propose an object-oriented analysis method for the development of such a Customer Relationship Management Information System (CRMIS). The approach starts from the identification of prospect customers and their desired behaviors under preferable execution environments, and ends with the specification of system-internal objects/entities that collaborate to satisfy these behaviors and environments. The method is a use case driven approach with UML utilized and extended as its tool. To illustrate, the method is applied to an exemplified CRMTS for house agency. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.