A critical survey of protocols proposed by the IETF as enablers for customer interaction in an electronic customer relationship management system -- Part I - eCRM metrics

Electronic customer interaction involves encouraging the customer to spend time electronically in order to obtain sufficient information regarding the customers needs, preferences and requirements. This information is analyzed using a process such as data mining to extract knowledge about customer values. Customer values are, in turn, used as the guiding principle in the market-planning phase to customize and personalize the services/goods/sales offered by the enterprise. An integrated approach to eCRM is important because it can be effectively used to analyze information for continuous, online and real-time learning of customer values. This paper focuses primarily on key technology issues and, to a lesser extent, on business and customer centric issues. We first identify what factors (metrics) are valuable in an eCRM system from the point of view of the various stakeholders and associate a priority level (critical, important, and desirable) with each metric. As shown in Figure 1, the three stakeholders typically identified in an eCRM framework are the customer, the business enterprise and the provider of technology [2].