Domain engineering for customer experience management

Customer experience management (CXM) denotes a set of practices, processes, and tools, that aim at personalizing a customer’s interactions with a company around the customer’s needs and desires (Walker in The emergence of customer experience management solutions, 2011). The past few years have seen the emergence of a new generation of context-aware CXM applications that exploit the IoT, AI, and cloud computing to provide rich and personalized customer experiences. Such applications are usually developed in an ad-hoc fashion, typically as technology showcases, often with little validation in the field. Indeed, there is no methodology to elicit and specify the requirements for such applications, nor domain level reusable components that can be leveraged to implement such applications with the context of e-commerce solutions. An e-commerce software vendor asked us to do just that, in a domain with a fragmented scientific literature, and with no portfolio of applications to draw upon. In this paper, we describe our domain engineering strategy, present the main elements of the technical approach, and discuss the main difficulties we faced in this domain engineering effort. Our approach is intended for marketing analysts and customer experience designers. It offers to them a methodology and tools to design customer experiences and generate building blocks of CXM functionalities to be integrated in e-commerce suites of their customers—the retailers.