Adaptive web front-end for SaaS customer relationship management

Abstract

SaaS providers are facing grand challenges in effectively promoting their offerings as well as managing interactions with a large number of SMB customers. In this paper, we present a Web front-end system that is able to collect various types of information during the interaction with customers, detect business situation to identify customer state change, and adaptively pick up appropriate interaction channels and contents for motivating customer to transit towards the desired states. The system takes a customer lifecycle management centric approach and extensively leverages Web 2.0 notion and technologies to help SaaS providers attract and retain customers. A dashboard is provided for SaaS providers to gain customer insights as well as evaluate the effectiveness of different approaches for offering promotion and customer loyalty improvement. A scenario chosen from a practice for a small ERP type of offering is introduced to give readers the understanding on how the system can be applied to real cases. We also analyze the effectiveness of the real application and give suggestions to SaaS providers.