Evaluation and improvement of proactive customer notification in e-commerce environment

Abstract

The Internet, and thus e-commerce, both Business to Consumer (B2C) and Business to Business (B2B), has changed the way companies do business with each other and communicate with their customers. Because of the speed of the Internet, information transfer both among companies and between a company and its customers has become faster, albeit technologically more complex, in the e-commerce era. It has been a challenge for e-companies to develop creative, satisfying ways of communicating with their customers. After all, the Internet is approximately a decade old, and there has not been enough accumulation of knowledge about customer behavior. Unlike in conventional shopping where the customer takes the product with him/her or makes specific delivery arrangements in a specific geographical zone, in e-commerce the customer picks a specific delivery method from literally anywhere in the world at any time. This, of course, brings many logistical challenges for a successful delivery. Dell Computer Corporation, famous for its build-to-order and direct model, is one of the biggest e-commerce companies in the world and, thus, faces the challenges that any e- commerce company must confront, such as communicating with customers efficiently in a timely manner. Therefore, such logistical challenges that the e-commerce era has brought are not unique to Dell. One such challenge is effective communication with the customer after a shipment is just processed. This thesis focuses on finding best-of-breed technologies and applications in the proactive customer notification field through benchmarking.

(cont.) This thesis also offers a tool to evaluate various technology providers and to make decisions based on the analysis.