An Ontology Based Approach for Next Generation Customer Relationship Management Systems

Abstract

Customer relationship management - CRM systems aim to increase customer satisfaction and loyalty to the company through actions that can be performed by monitoring and analyzing customer behaviours for companies. In these systems, the data obtained from different sources such as sales process, service, and call center are interpreted by the CRM experts as a whole, and the necessary action is taken for the customer. With the rapid progress in information technologies, the diversity of channels that are used to collect data, the size and dynamism of the data have increased. This situation has made it impossible for experts to wholly interpret big-size data from a wide variety of sources in a short period of time. In the CRM area, there is a need for technologies that automatically integrate the data obtained from several sources and can interpret it semantically. In this study, an ontology-based approach is proposed, which allows automatic semantic interpretations on the data obtained from different sources. Based on the proposed approach, a tool has been developed that can unify data from different CRM systems in a common format and make customer-centric interpretations of this data. The tool continuously monitors the systems it is integrated with, and when it detects the conditions defined by the users on the data, it can automatically perform the actions determined by the users. The tool developed was experienced by integrating a CRM system of a company and the evaluation results obtained in this process were discussed.