10. Experience Management for Electronic Commerce

Abstract

A major requirement of today’s online shops is the availability of competent virtual sales agents that guide the customers through the vast space of available products, services, and other opportunities. Today’s state-of-the-art online shops provide search functions that should help customers to find relevant product information. While these search functions are considered quite important by the online sellers, the quality of the retrieval results is miserable (Hagen 2000). The key to enhancing search quality, and more generally, to approach the vision of intelligent knowledgeable virtual sales agents, is to incorporate more knowledge about products, customers and the sales process into the sales agent. This is particularly important in the world of today and tomorrow, which is characterized through continuously increasing globalization. The quality of service becomes the dominating factor for achieving customer satisfaction and a good customer relationship. As a consequence customer relationship management (CRM) (Martin 1999; Newell 1999; CRM Forum 1999) and knowledge management (KM) have been recognized as core disciplines with strategic importance for successful future business. In the context of companies which communicate with their customers and partners via electronic online media, this requires making the company knowledge available and visible thorough the virtual agents that are supposed to be the primary access points to the company.

This chapter describes a generic experience management approach for electronic commerce. The results presented in this chapter have been achieved as part of the WEBSELL project and have been previously published in part by Vollrath et al. (1998), Wilke (1999), Schmitt and Bergmann (1999b), Schmitt and Bergmann (1999a), Cunningham et al. (2001), Schmitt et al. (2000), Bergmann, Traphöner, Schmitt, Cunningham, and Smyth (2002), and Bergmann, Schmitt, and Stahl (2002).