Enabling customers engagement and collaboration for small and medium-sized enterprises in ubiquitous multi-channel ecosystems

Abstract

Over the last few years, we have encountered an exponential growth in online communication opportunities. Organizations have more and more ways to connect and engage with their current or future customers. The existence of more opportunities in connecting to people can be both an enabler and a burden. Being present at a multitude of different channels requires the effective management of a very large number of adapted contents, formats, and interaction patterns fulfilling the communication and cooperation needs of distributed target groups. In this respect, we integrate existing fragmented communication and monitoring approaches into a full-fledged communication model as a basis for an adequate engagement approach. We describe applications of our approach in both the eTourism and manufacturing domain. In this paper, we introduce an approach that will enable communication, collaboration and value exchange of users through a multitude of online interaction possibilities based on the use of semantic technology. Finally, we also compare our approach with existing solutions with respect to the identified challenges in this subject.