Custom Fit

Personalization can greatly improve productivity and usability while providing key marketing advantages

By Colin White

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Rules-Based Software

In their simplest form, rules-based products are used during marketing campaigns to sell specific products or services. When the user moves to a particular Web page, the latest special offers associated with that section of the Web site (consumer electronics, for example) are displayed. The information displayed is governed by rules that are defined by marketing staff based on business expertise, Web-site analysis, and experience gained from earlier campaigns. Web application servers from vendors such as BroadVision Inc. (Retail Commerce Suite), IBM (WebSphere), Microsoft (Site Server), Open Market Inc. (EBusiness Suite), and BEA Systems (WebLogic Server) all support a rules-based approach to building dynamic Web pages. Several vendors provide Web clickstream analytic applications that help marketers to understand buying patterns and to fine-tune their marketing campaigns. Vendors with products in this latter category include Accrue Software Inc., Macromedia Inc., Broadbase Software Inc., E.piphany Inc., Informix, Informatica Corp., Net Perceptions Inc., NetGenesis Corp., and WebTrends Corp.

Focus on the Customer

The objective of e-marketing is to create and retain loyal customers that become regular visitors to an online merchant. To achieve this loyalty, personalization must be customer-centric, not product-centric as is the case with many Web sites. Thus personalization must focus not only on providing tailored product offerings, but also on providing better service. One approach to customer-centric personalization is to capture and record every online purchase made by the Web user. Each record can then be analyzed and used to create a detailed profile of every customer's buying preferences. The more in-depth your profile is, the better your e-business application can personalize your Web content to meet customer needs and provide better service. Accurate data about customer preferences enables e-business applications to use techniques such as rules-driven alerts that inform customers via email about new product offers or recalls, or in the case of investment firms, about events that may affect the value of stock holdings.

Nevertheless, a true customer-centric approach to marketing does not stop here. A business should track every interaction with the customer, including calls to service and support centers and purchases made via other channels (by telephone or in a retail store, for example). This information is maintained in an integrated customer database (sometimes called a customer operational data store, or customer ODS). The challenge in creating an integrated customer ODS is correlating interactions that may have different customer identifiers at each touch point.

An integrated customer ODS can give you a detailed understanding of your customers - enabling you to market and sell through sales channels your customers prefer. Your business can improve customer service by identifying after-sale issues such as delayed deliveries, product problems, and so forth. Retaining customers involves not only having a personalized interface, but also providing superior personal service. Data mining and OLAP technologies can be used to analyze the contents of the ODS to determine customer buying habits and trends. This analysis can then be used to drive campaign management systems.

It is not possible for a single vendor to develop a complete set of products that support e-business operations, analytic applications, a customer ODS, recommendation engines, and automated rules generation. Instead, vendors are forming product development and marketing relationships that support the intelligent e-business framework shown in Figure 1.

Personalizing Corporate Portals

The fastest growing personalization technology in the corporate business environment is in the area of corporate portals. The main objective of a portal is to provide business users with an integrated and personalized view of corporate business content (information, applications, expertise, and so on). Portals are a hot topic; and vendors have been quick to jump on the portal bandwagon with the result that the marketplace is crowded with portal products at different levels of maturity.

Portals have their origins in the Internet where search facilities like my.

yahoo.com provide users with easy access to information. Corporations have rapidly adopted portal technology for organizing and personalizing access to information on corporate intranets because it dramatically improves user productivity. In many organizations, a portal has now become the sole interface to information managed by both internal and external Web servers. Over the past year, portal products have evolved beyond simple interfaces to Web information and now support additional business content like business intelligence, workgroup information (documents, email, and so forth), and back- and front-office applications. Examples of representative portal products include IBM Enterprise Information Portal, Informix's Axielle E-Intelligence Portal, Lotus K-Station, Oracle9i AS Portal, Plumtree Corporate Portal, Verity Portal One, and Viador E-Portal.

To date, most portal products have been employed by internal business users, but with the growth of e-business use, organizations are now integrating portal technology into their e-business systems. This integration allows a company to extend portal access to external trading partners and key clients, which improves business relationships, and helps optimize business processes such as supply chain management. Integrating portal technology into the e-business environment is a complex task. It requires a portal that not only supports internal e-business applications, but also interoperates with external systems. Extensible markup language (XML) is beginning to play a key role in helping solve the problem of application integration and information interchange.