Grant: Engage Plus Grants Program

Orckestra is an SME that provides e-commerce solutions to customers in North America and Europe. Its flagship product, OvertureTM, is a 'new generation' e-commerce suite that supports, 1) a unified data infrastructure, supporting omnichannel e-commerce, 2) a powerful end-user functionality for data aggregation and presentation, 3) an open message-oriented architecture supporting the integration of third-party tools, 4) and a variety of deployment models. With OvertureTM, Orckestra operates in a crowded and highly competitive market, and product innovation is key to its thriving, if not outright survival. To this end, Orckestra wants to augment OvertureTM 's omnichannel e-commerce capabilities with context-aware functionalities to enhance customer experience management (CEM). Such functionalities would enable an e-commerce suite to enhance a customer's shopping experience by providing information about a product they are browsing, or by recommending a product that matches their taste, their self-image, or their values. The long-term purpose of this collaboration is to help Orckestra identify, design, and integrate the software modules needed to support CEM functionalities into its flagship e-commerce suite. The first Engage project explored the extent to which a domain modeling of the interactions between a customer and a company within the context of a purchase process can help elicit the business, user, and software requirements for generic CEM functionalities. Our preliminary research confirmed that: we found that a psychological modeling of consumer behavior helps identify the kind of representation of a customer, and the interaction modalities between the customer and the software, that are needed to implement CEM functionalities. The purpose of this EngagePlus project is to test this approach within the context of a relatively simple, real-world purchasing scenario, before proceeding to, a) develop the theory, and b) design and implement the requisite software tools.