The CRM of tomorrow with semantic technology

Abstract

Customer Support or Relation Management (CRM) used to be a post-sale after-thought, an obligation stemming from product sales and a cost of doing business. No longer! In today's abundance of product/service choices, CRM must be an integral part of business to maintain brand loyalty, which is becoming critical for any business to survive. What if you can anticipate what you can do for your customers before they know it, predict what your customers may like or dislike and take steps to address potential problems before your customers switch vendors, or target individual marketing campaign to very specific and appreciative group of customers instead of spamming. How would this improve a business bottom-line and change its operation? This paper discusses an Intelligent Decision Automation platform for such a CRM system of tomorrow. It was built by Amdocs and Franz using semantic technology, machine learning and scalable java middleware. The Semantic platform consists of a number of elements: an Event Collector, a Decision Engine, the AllegroGraph triple store, a Bayesian Belief Network and a Rule Workbench. Combined, this pipeline of technology implements an event-condition-action framework to drive business process in real time. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.