Project No.: 5003-057750 01.01.00 - 31.12.01

Project leader: Prof. Boi Faltings, Laboratoire d'Intelligence Artificielle, Dép. Informatique, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL)
e-mail: faltings@lia.di.epfl.ch

Name of project: Management of Customer Relationship (MCR)

Partners: Prof. Beat Schmid, Institut for Medien- und Kommunikationsmanagement,
University of St. Gallen
Dr. Eric Revaz, Pioneers Research & Consulting, Fèchy VD
Dr. André Lang, Inforge HEC, University of Lausanne

Funding: Sfr 597,315.-

Summary: Developments in electronic commerce open up new opportunities in supplier-customer relations. E-commerce offers customers much faster ways of finding out what is on the market and of dealing with a supplier than through the traditional contact with a member of the supplier's sales staff. For their part, suppliers have more means of getting their products and services known, but they have to pay greater attention to presenting their offerings in a convincing way.

Both business-to-business and business-to-consumer relations will be increasingly conducted through so-called electronic communities.

The work can be divided into the following packages:

1. Analysis of customer needs (e.g. for an insurance product) and determining suitable products in an electronic catalog (IBM Research Laboratory, Rüschlikon).

2. Active searching: until now, searches have depended on knowing the contents of the catalog. The new tool to be developed (based on constraint satisfaction) takes at its starting point the customer's goals (LIA EPFL).

3. Networked product catalog: booking a journey requires access to various catalogs (travel, hotels, excursions, etc.). To achieve this, a system of prototypical agents is being developed to combine catalogs in the travel industry (EPFL).

4. Mechanisms to monitor the certification and reputation of the individual market participants (University of Lausanne).

5. Acquisition of information and „Infomediaries" (University of Lausanne and Dr. Revaz).

6. Support of collaboration between buyers or between sellers in the request-for-proposal process (University of Lausanne and Dr. Revaz)

7. Analysis of new forms of value creation: the purpose is to determine what changes in the value creation processes are to be expected on the basis of new technologies (mcm Instiitute, University of St. Gallen)

8. Generic concept for the management of customer relationship (MCR): this part is concerned with the synthesis of the previous work packages. It consists of a conceptional part, a market survey to examine the existing MCR tools, and recommendations for newcomers (mcm Instiitute of the University of St. Gallen)

9. Financial models for assessing customer-related activities (mcm Instiitute of the University of St. Gallen)

10. Textual synthesis and collation of the preceding packages (mcm Instiitute of the University of St. Gallen)

This is a joint research project of the four applicants and their partners; while the constituent projects are fairly loosely coupled, they are presented in a binding timeframe. Prof. Faltings is the overall project leader. The project will establish a demonstrator comprising as many work package components as possible, as well as studies on those items that cannot be readily combined in a demonstrator.

The planned activities are based largely on projects which have already been brought to a successful conclusion in the Swiss Priority Programme for Information and Communication Structures (SPP-ICS), especially Phase 1 of the Electronic Commerce Competence Network.

Cooperation: IBM Research Laboratory, Rüschlikon; Atraxis AG, Zurich; Swisslife, Zurich; Definitive Systems Ltd.; Cantons of Vaud and Geneva, Lucerne Polytechnic (Fachhochschule Luzern).