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XML as Infrastructure in Internet Relationship Management

Paula Angerstein

Vignette Corp. 901 S. MoPac Expy, Building 3
Austin Texas USA 78746
Phone: 1 512 306 4519
Email: paulaa@vignette.com

Biographical notice:

Paula Angerstein is Principal XML Architect at Vignette Corp., a key player in the emerging category of Internet Relationship Management Systems. Paula also represents Vignette in the W3C XML Activity and has had a long involvement with standards development, including membership in SGML-related ANSI, ISO, and CALS committees.

Formerly at Texcel Research Inc., she was instrumental in designing and deploying Texcel's Information Manager SGML document management system. Previously, she has held consulting, planning, and marketing roles at Interleaf and Computer Task Group. At Texet, Xerox, and Unisys, she implemented SGML software. She received a BA in both Computer Science and Journalism from the University of Texas at Austin. She received GCA's Tekkie award in 1989.

ABSTRACT:

Your company's ability to compete and win online is defined by a whole new set of market dynamics. These challenges demand a fresh appreciation of customer relationships and organizational strategies.

An emerging category of products and services known as "Internet relationship management" assists businesses in using the Web as a new channel for customer acquisition and retention. The opportunity for businesses who take advantage of this new channel is to build long-term, high-value relationships with customers and then to use those relationships to create new market opportunities.

Already proven to be a critical technology for Internet content management, XML is also a key enabler of Internet relationship management. This paper discusses a number of ways in which XML serves as infrastructure for building successful customer relationships.

Framing the Problem

Indisputable fact #1: On the Internet, the customer is in control in a way never before possible.

Old rules of geographic and price-based control are out. The old adage "location, location, location" no longer has to do with being conveniently on the way home from the office or next door to the most popular grocery store in town. It means being in front of the eyeballs on the way from one Web stop to another and making your Web site the obvious next stop to solve the problem at hand. Price is much less of a factor when the consumer can easily locate the best deal on the Net and simply buy from that supplier.

New rules of delivering convenience and advice are in. In the physical world, people like stores where they can get what they need easily and have the option of a friendly person who can offer expert advice. The same is true online: a customer is more inclined to linger and eventually buy from a site that offers relevant advice and perhaps even tools for making a buying decision. Once a decision is made, the ease with which a customer can make a purchase is a critical factor because:

Indisputable fact #2: Your competitors are only a click away. You are facing new, powerful competitors with whom you have to fight to own the customer relationship. Customer loyalty to a site is much more fleeting as new competitors spring up at a fast pace and switching costs are minimal.

In summary, the Web fundamentally alters the customer/vendor relationship and forever empowers your customers to control their destiny, demand more rapid satisfaction, and be harder to satisfy than ever before. Your online business must accommodate this dramatic change.

Attacking the Problem

The way to attack the problem is to take control of the customer relationship, a strategy known as IRM (Internet Relationship Management) . After attracting the customer, IRM focuses on retaining the customer and building a trading network.

The key IRM strategy for retention is to maintain a relationship-based model for all customer contact. This may require you to rethink the assembly and delivery of your value and goods to your customers. Your business must be sensitive to the immediate needs of your customers and provide superlative consultation with a minimum of frustration. In essence, your site must provide a more pleasant, useful, and efficient experience for the customer than your competitors to such a degree that the customer would feel the pain of switching.

Building a trading network means going to where the customer is instead of making him come to you. A key IRM strategy here is to build a network of affiliates that make your site visible at precisely the right time for the customer. Consider the example of a bank who provides a number of services such as banking services, loan services, and financial advice. That bank will obviously have its own site to provide direct services, but it should also have presence at thematic sites, such as auto purchase sites to provide loan services, service sites such as financial software sites to provide financial services, and of course at general portal and searching sites.

XML to the Rescue

The successful Web site is the one driven by smart applications that have at hand as much information as possible about the customer and have access to a pool of information that can be personalized to meet that customer's needs. XML serves as an enabler for this strategy in two important ways:

As the means to define a standard vocabulary of assimilated items known about a customer
As the means to mark up content so that smart applications perform some level of interpretation on it and provide personalized experiences for the customer

The notion of a customer as a set of defining and historical information can be of tremendous value to your organization. Customer information is needed as input to many areas of your organization, from sales tracking to order fulfillment to support and helpdesk functions. XML's ability to define a set of information and represent it in a standard way lets you encapsulate a set of customer information and use it across your organization. This means the applications that support these groups for various purposes can share their knowledge of a customer, enhancing the organization's understanding of a customer over time. It is this understanding of a customer that allows you to personalize your site and services for him, minimizing the customer's frustration with your site and organization, and promoting loyalty.

Identifying the pool of information, or content, that is used to support the customer experience and using XML to label, or "mark up," this content also provides real benefits. Your content now has a rich set of self-identifying information that applications can use to intelligently query, process, and enhance the data. Your site can match the customer's needs with a proposed solution and provide the consultation the customer needs to finalize a decision. Additionally, all members of your organization can have at hand relevant information to make personal contact with the customer as efficient as possible.

The source for this content may be managed by a number of applications throughout the enterprise. XML provides the "common language" for these applications to communicate. Applications can produce XML either to simply package content for transport or to actually embed some description of the content's meaning in the package. Receiving applications can be equipped either to simply parse the packages or additionally infer the meaning of the contents. With an additional straightforward XML-to-HTML translation step, applications that consume HTML can participate in this interchange. Now you have meaningful integration between your Web applications and other enterprise applications thereby unifying content creation, management, analysis, and Web delivery. Choosing applications that utilize XML frees you to cleanly separate information from its processes, reducing your switching costs for a component in your system, and giving you the agility you need to keep improving your business.

Building a trading network requires the means to establish relationships with affiliates and maintain a dynamic interchange of content. The ICE (Information and Content Exchange) Protocolhttp://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-ice specifies a standard way to participate in content syndication. ICE uses XML to describe the format of messages sent between syndicators and subscribers to establish subscription relationships and to deliver content. Actual content does not have to be marked up with XML, but can be. The ICE framework enables you to integrate e-commerce, security, and other business support into your syndication strategy.

In summary, XML gives your Web site and organization the smarts it needs to build and maintain meaningful relationships with your customers, enabling your business to be a leader in today's online business world.


Streamlined Multimedia Production and Distribution Line		Table of contents		Indexes		XML and E-commerce: A Publisher's Perspective