The design of software-agent architecture for customer relationship management in utility service-based business

A challenge facing businesses establishing an effective customer relationship management (CRM) system is the need for integrating data from different sources. Many data integration approaches have been proposed and widely adopted to improve customer services. However, not all data integration approaches are suitable for utility service-based business due to its unique characteristics. The study explores the idea of using software agents to address the integration issue of building CRM systems for utility service-based businesses. The study proposes two simple agent interaction models, the request-response model and the subscription-publishing model as well as six categories of agents to meet the need. The utility and validity of the proposed approach are examined and verified in a real-world case. They are implemented with extensible markup language (XML) and applied to create an agent-based architecture for a CRM system for a telecommunication company in Taiwan.