An event driven approach to customer relationship management in e-brokerage industry

Customer relationship management (CRM) is critical to the success of a business. Recent work in CRM has focused on the mining of customer-related data and the construction of customer behavior models. In this paper, we present a framework for an effective detection of business events that trigger the execution of customer-related activities based on a set of predefined business rules. An event is the occurrence of something interesting to the system itself or to user applications. Event driven execution of rules in event-condition-action (ECA) form can ensure efficiency and timeliness. This is an important aspect of CRM that few researchers have reported. In the e-brokerage industry, business events concern mainly with clients, brokerage firms and the stock market environment. Business events due to the clients include order placement, complaints filing, service exceptions, and change of personal profiles. Business events due to the brokerage firms include staff turnovers and amendment of e-brokerage services. Business events due to the environment include market news and fluctuation of stock prices. An event-driven CRM prototype implementing the proposed framework has been successfully applied to support an e-brokerage system. The prototype integrates a client portal, a call center, a managerial application, external event detectors and an analysis engine. There is little room in Hong Kong's stock brokerage industry for a brokerage firm to increase its revenue through cross- or up-sale trading. The key success factor of a brokerage is therefore its ability to retain existing clients and to increase their satisfaction through effective coordination and enactment of CRM activities.