An adherence support framework for service delivery in customer life cycle management

Abstract

In customer life cycle management, service providers are expected to deliver services to meet customer objectives in a manner governed by some contract or agreement. When human agents are involved as contract parties (either as customers or service providers), service delivery failures may occur as a result of changes, inconsistencies, or "deficits" in the mental attitudes of these agents (in addition to other possible changes in the service delivery environment). It may be possible to avoid such failures by monitoring the behavior of the contract parties and intervening to ensure adherence to the contractual obligations. The aim of this paper is twofold: (1) to develop a conceptual framework to model how deficits in mental attitudes can affect service delivery; and (2) to propose an adherence support architecture to reduce service delivery failures arising from such deficits. The conceptual framework is based on Bratman's notion of "future-directed intentions" and Castelfranchi's belief-based goal dynamics. The adherence support architecture introduces the notions of precursor events, mental-state recognition processes, and intervention processes and utilizes the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture. A multi-agent implementation is carried out for chronic disease management in health care as a proof-of-concept for a complex customer care management system. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.