An Architecture for Cloud-based Consumer Support Software-as-a-Service

For enterprises, customer relationships have been commonly recognized as a critical factor to succeed their business. Effective customer relationships could help enterprises deliver services to customers based on their needs, preferences, or past transactions. This model however emphasizes on the use of customer information for benefiting enterprises; customers in contrast receive less information from enterprises. To address this issue, the paradigm Consumer Support Systems (CSS) is proposed to support effective information provision for customers to help on their decision making. In addition, since Cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) has been popularity for its rich set of features and their practical applications can be expected, it is thus an envisioned trend for CSS to employ SaaS as its service provisioning model to enhance further its effectiveness on customer relationships. For this need, we present in this paper an architecture for such a SaaS-employed CSS (i.e., Consumer Support SaaS, CSSaaS). The architecture is identified from the consideration of CSS and SaaS characteristics, through the recognition of architectural components that support the employment of SaaS into CSS, and finally ends with the deployment of these architectural components to configuration elements in realistic clouds for the realization of CSSaaS.