Enhancing customer relationships by semantic consumer support systems

For enterprises to succeed in their business, customer relationships have been commonly recognized as a critical factor. Effective customer relationships help enterprises deliver services to customers based on their needs or preferences. In this context, many ideas have already been presented among which Consumer Support Systems (CSS) is the most recently introduced, and one that alleviates the shortcomings of other approaches by a 4-layer framework of collaborative mechanisms to support effective information/service provision between customers and enterprises. Since there are many integration issues to be addressed in CSS (e.g., sharing of information/requests among customers or comparison of services from enterprises), a comprehensive structure for easy sharing/comparison of this information/requests/services in the literature is therefore necessary. To meet this need, we present a specification method in this paper that takes advantage of the pristine structure for knowledge-sharing by ontology to specify these materials in respective ontologies. With such ontological semantics, CSS is particularly able to support dynamic service provision for customers where desired requests can be satisfied by suitable services in a dynamic manner through referencing any matches between request and service ontologies. The method is illustrated by a semantic CSS for travel arrangements and more discussions about the application of its constructed ontologies for enhancing customer relationships are also provided. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.