Personalized Presentation of Policies and Processes

Conclusion

Research on personalization in e-commerce has often focused on marketing products and services to customers prior to a sale. Meanwhile, organizations have become interested in using the web to enable customers to solve their own problems. In this chapter, we have argued for greater personalization in self-service, both in explaining an organization’s policies in the context of the customer’s own data, and in enabling an agent working on behalf of the customer to collect and integrate information about his actions online.

We believe these techniques can provide help beyond just the domain of sales. As we noted before, people are often faced with abstract policies that make sense only when applied in concrete cases, preferably their own. They stand to benefit from clearer explanations from the organizations they interact with. These can include illustrations of the rules associated with an employee’s benefits or, as we saw, even the processes involved in determining an individual’s status within the organization. More broadly, there are many domains in which end-users can benefit from being able to inspect the history of information that affects them, such as, for instance, notations on their credit reports. All of this begins by combining user data with representations of organization policies for the users’ benefit.