Moving Co-Branding To The Web: Service-Level Agreement Implications

Virtual co-branding moves to the Web a popular practice in the physical world whereby a customer partner syndicates the services (e.g. product retail) of a provider partner in his own portal. However, virtual brand integration is more than offering each brand products in the same virtual space. Other aspects such as reliability, usability or quality of distinct supporting services should be agreed upon to guarantee a certain quality of service (QoS) on the final cobranding arrangement. Otherwise, the image of both brands can be eroded. This paper argues that current service-level agreement approaches, mainly centered on reliability issues, can be extended to accommodate other key issues in co-branding. The paper focuses on CRM concerns, and provides some insights on how a QoS framework, IBM ’s WSLA, can be extended to incorporate CRM QoS concerns.