Title: PERSONALISED SERVICES

Personalised Services

The basis for the realisation of individualised and personalised services is the collection and usage of personal customer data. According to the Electronic Commerce Enquête IV (ECE IV) (Sackmann and Strüker, 2005) survey with regard to the German market, almost two-thirds of the enterprises participating (65.2 %) stated that they use customer data. 51.7 % of these enterprises already use the collected data for the analysis of the payment behaviour of the customers and a further 4.7 % plan to use customer data for this purpose within the next two years. In second place is the analysis of the purchasing history of their customers, which is conducted by 45.6 % of the respondent enterprises with customer data. It even stands in first position with 7.0 % for the planned usage of customer in the next two years. Only 17.6 % use the data of their customers for the social-demographic analysis according age, gender or standard of education of their customers. The surfing behaviour of their customers is, on the other hand, only evaluated by 6.3 % of the participating enterprises. Finally, with the use of customer data the participating service providers pursue the goals of personalised address of their customers (57.0 %), an individualisation of purchasing discussions (53.8 %) and an adaptation of their products or services to their customers (47.4 %). Over half the enterprises that already use customer data plan to expand their current activities.

If one considers the differences between the various enterprise sise ranges, then it appears that personal data of their customers is primarily collected and used by major enterprises irrespective of the concrete form of the data. Hence, 53.4 % of 146 major enterprises, 44.0 % of 141 medium-sised enterprises, 38.9% of 131 small enterprises use the purchasing of their end customers. Most of the enterprises are thereby engaged in the branches of the manufacturing trade (44.2 %) and the credit and insurance business (42.1 %).

A utilisation of personal data of customers and customer-oriented business processes involved is summarised under the term of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). With the employment of CRM systems an enterprise aims at (Bange and Schinzer, 2005)

1. a minimisation of investment costs for customer search,

2. a maximisation of the sale of private production capacities and services, and

3. possible long-term customer loyalty with the enterprise. 

CRM is thereby no one-show conducted measure, but a continuously repeated process consisting of analysis and awareness gaining phases, strategy development and planning, interaction with the customer, as well as refinement and adaptation. A service provider thus aims at the optimisation of customer profitability of the whole life cycle of a customer starting from customer identification through to improvement of customer value and continued existence of customers. A customer is thereby individually addressed (personalisation) and integrated into the production process (mass customisation) (Banke and Schinzer, 2005).

CRM systems are used to support customer orientation, whereby a general CRM system is comprised of the three subsystems of operative, collaborative and analytical CRM and adapts the business processes of a service provider to the individual attributes of a customer. Figure 3.1 shows the architecture of a general CRM system.

Figure 3. Architecture of the general CRM system.

The collaborative CRM subsystem constitutes the interface of the service provider to his customers. The various communication channels are shown adaptively to the customer’s end device. The interface is realised in Internet and also for access via a customer’s mobile end device with a portal. The operative CRM subsystem adapts the business processes to the individual customers by having access to the data collected about the customers and controlling the information flow of the customer data for the business processes concerned. It contains functions for automating sales, marketing activities, and for customer service. The task of the analytical CRM subsystem is the analysis of the collected customer data with regard to a customer-oriented business processes. The central element thereby is the customer database which is used by a service provider to manage all customer data, which he has received through a data collection with the operative CRM subsystem or from external data sources. The aim of an analysis of the customer data is to recognise the needs, potentials and risks with prospective and established customers and there from derive measures for a personalised customer address.

With the development of monolithical and (in the course of time) proprietary IT systems through to distributed and dynamical IT systems in accordance with the service oriented architecture (SOA) (Huhns and Singh, 2005), an automated and dynamical realisation of service processes is becoming possible which supports an intercompany networking. Hagel and Brown (Hagel and Brown, 2001) underline the differences between both types of IT systems and the employment possibilities of an IT system in accordance with the SOA. It is thus difficult to adapt business processes dynamically to the market changes according to new functionality and restructuring with former IT systems. These IT systems in fact predetermine business processes. Enterprises can develop their IT system according to their business processes with the flexibility and an open standardised architecture of an IT systems according to SOA, concentrate on their core competencies, offer them as a service for further service providers and integrate into their own IT system the required functionality depending on the requirements of a business process during its life-span.