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Conversational AI agents are fundamentally changing how firms are delivering service to their customers. The rapid advancement of technology and ready tools means that deploying a conversational AI agent has become far simpler than ever imagined. However, customers remain unsatisfied with their experience and firms are unable to demonstrate value of conversational AI agents. Drawing on the theoretical notions of customer experience (CX) management, personalization, and AI in service, we develop a framework to design conversational AI agents. We propose a six-stage iterative design for conversational AI agents that begins with sensing customer intent, adapting to journey context, assigning tone to the conversation, delegating to humans, orchestrating processes to service requests and training of AI agents to adaptively improve and loopback into prior design stages. Additionally, we recognize that firms need to holistically qualify and allocate service requests to such conversational AI agents based on the firm’ s purpose and CX strategy.

Personal attitude to the consumer has always been one of the foundations of the hospitality industry. However, digitalization, the pandemic and the hotel industry development have thrown new challenges to the industry, stimulating it to modernize its approach to guest service, providing a wow effect when creating experiences. If earlier requests were relatively the same, there was one approach to all guests, now this does not work, and an individual nature of the proposals is needed. Today, there is a need to move away from traditional sales to building “relationships” with guests. In the process of work, a set of methods, models and theories were used, such as: Alderfer-Maslow's motivation theory, consumer behavior model, Abel's model. Initial research has shown that in practice hotels face a reluctance to provide personalized service to the guest, although the number of such travelers is growing rapidly. The article shows modern marketing approaches for differentiated guest service in a hotel, develops an algorithm for implementing a full-fledged individual approach, presents the three-dimensional Abel system and the ERG theory in the context of an individual hotel product., Originally published in https://ruservices.rgutspubl.org/index.php/1/article/view/256

It is established that in the “client era”, the key factors for successful business development are the formation of a unique service and positive customer experience at each point of interaction between the client and the company and the introduction of digital technologies for managing customer experience. The factors that form the customer's impression and affect the quality of consumer experience management are studied. The expediency of revising the principles of Customer Relationship Management based on the implementation of the client-centered thinking policy, adapting the company's business development model to new trends in customer behavior, and ensuring digital transformation of customer service is proved. Attention is focused on taking into account such key trends of customer behavior in managing consumer experience as ensuring the "seamless" nature of customer communication with the company and providing them with personalized service. It is proved that effective tools for managing customer experience are solutions in the field of customer experience design, metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of consumer interaction with the company, new approaches to the formation of marketing policy and digital marketing tools. The practice of digital projects implemented by leading companies shows that the implementation of digital initiatives is carried out in three key areas: first, automation and robotization of processes, implementation of Process Mining and Business Process Management, as well as digital models and doubles; second, data-based enterprise management (analytics, data forecasting, artificial intelligence and “big data”, Decision Support Systems, etc.) and, third, customer experience management (digital marketing and CDP (Customer data platform-customer response database to marketing decisions), customer experience research tools, omni-channel customer interaction, analytics and clustering of customer behavior). The features of using metrics for evaluating the effectiveness of customer interaction with the company are revealed, and the following key tools for evaluating the effectiveness of consumer experience management should be highlighted: Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Index (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), Return of Experience (ROX)., Встановлено, що в «епоху клієнта» ключовими факторами успішного розвитку бізнесу є формування унікального сервісу та позитивного клієнтського досвіду в кожній точці взаємодії споживача з компанією і впровадження цифрових технологій управління клієнтським досвідом. Досліджено фактори, які формують враження клієнта і впливають на якість управління споживчим досвідом. Доведено доцільність перегляду принципів управління взаємовідносинами зі споживачами на основі провадження політики клієнтоцентричного мислення, адаптації бізнес-моделі розвитку компанії до нових трендів клієнтської поведінки, забезпечення цифрової трансформації клієнтського сервісу. Акцентовано увагу на врахуванні таких ключових трендів клієнтської поведінки при управлінні споживчим досвідом, як забезпечення «безшовного» характеру комунікації клієнтів з компанією і надання їм персоналізованого сервісу. Доведено, що ефективними інструментами управління клієнтським досвідом є рішення у сфері проєктування досвіду клієнтів, метрики оцінювання ефективності взаємодії споживачів з компанією, нові підходи до формування маркетингової політики та інструменти digital-маркетингу.

The aim of this article is to discuss an advanced approach to recommendation systems, based on the adoption of Deep Feed-Forward Neural Networks. Recommendation engines are data-driven infrastructures designed to help customers in their decision-making process, and nowadays represent the “state of the art” in designing smart and personalized services, in accordance with the new customer-centric perspective. For this purpose, we followed a quantitative methodological approach, comparing the predictive ability of traditional “Collaborative” recommendation algorithms, like the k-Nearest Neighbors (k-NN) and the Singular Value Decomposition (SVD), with Feed-Forward Neural Networks; given these assumptions, we finally demonstrated that a “Deep” Neural architecture could achieve better results in terms of “loss” generated by the model, laying the foundations for a new, innovative paradigm in service recommendation science.

В статье рассмотрена архитектура системы корпоративного информирования, которая обеспечивает информационную поддержку сотрудников организации и является частью киберфизической системы предприятия. В задачи, выполняемые данной системой, входит отображение информационных материалов на мобильные пользовательские устройства и стационарные экраны управление информационным контентом и процессами его предоставления приоритезация информации на персонифицированной основе. Предлагаемая система корпоративного информирования ориентирована на отображение цифрового контента и объединяет в себе следующие компоненты: серверный компонент основной функциональный модуль, размещенный на сервере приложений киберфизической системы организации, включающий в себя в том числе и программные модули для взаимодействия с хранилищами, а также программные компоненты, интегрированные с ПО стационарных экранов. Рассмотрены сценарии взаимодействия стационарных экранов и серверного компонента подсистемы корпоративного информирования для реализации управления расписаниями, событиями, а также загруженным в систему контентом. Предложена алгоритмическая модель динамического формирования и приоритезации пользовательских уведомлений на основе тематических классификационных групп, уровня доступа пользователей, перечня актуальных событий и сроков их актуальности. Предлагаемая система корпоративного информирования использует стандартные сетевые технологии и не привязана к конкретным программно-аппаратным платформам. Она соответствует критериям расширяемости и переносимости и пригодна для интеграции в качестве компонента киберфизической системы организации., This paper discusses an architecture of a corporate notification system, ensuring information support for enterprise staff and belongs to the corporate cyber-physical system. The tasks of this system include: display of content on mobile devices and stationary displays management of content data and its presentation personalized content prioritization. The proposed corporate notification system provides digital content display and embraces the following components: the backend main functional unit, being run on the corporate cyber-physical system application server, including, particularly, the software units for interoperation with data stores, as well software components, coupled with the software of the stationary screens. The interaction scenarios of stationary screens and corporate notification system server backend are considered to implement schedule management, events, as well management of content, uploaded into the system. Algorithmic model is proposed for dynamic composition and prioritization of user notifications, based on content classification groups, user access levels, relevant event lists and their relevance periods. The proposed corporate notification system employs usual networking technologies and has no dependencies with certain proprietary hardware and software platforms. It meets extensibility and portability criteria and can be integrated into existing corporate cyber-physical system as a new component., №4(27) (2019)

Part 1: Collaborative Networks; International audience; In diverse sectors companies collaborate to offer integrated user-centric services to obtain competitive advantage. However, regarding elderly care, services are typically isolated, and mostly provided by a single provider. Moreover, there is a need to personalize services in respect of the individuality of each senior and making these services evolve according to the lifestyle and necessities of the person. In this context, the concept of Elderly Care Ecosystem (ECE) emerges as a computer-based collaborative environment that promotes the integration of distinct services and providers. ECEs are complex systems that demand a clear description of their requirements, especially of those related to personalization of services. In this paper, we describe a set of core requirements and challenges for designing personalized services in an elderly care ecosystem. In particular, our contributions are: the identification of the main stakeholders of an ECE, the requirements to build a persona profile in ECE, and a reference requirements model based on i* for service personalization in ECE.

Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) arechanging the way people plan a journey and travel around theworld. Advanced mobility information systems, as well asintelligent multimodal mobility services, may take considerableadvantage of consolidated technologies from emerging ICTframeworks. In this paper we propose an Extended IntelligentTransportation System (ExITS) consisting of a basic ITSequipped with a User Centric Control System (UCCS). Theproposed ExITS relies on service personalization methodologiesand is conceived as a Future Internet (FI) oriented, closed-loop,user centric architecture integrating and controlling ITSservices. The proposed UCCS considers the trip planningservice and takes into account both explicit and implicit userpreferences in selecting travel solutions satisfying a given userrequest. The aim of the UCCS is to drive the trip planningservice in proposing to the user travel typologies tailored topersonal preferences. Implicit preferences are automaticallyinducted by similarity based unsupervised machine learningtechniques and verified by a closed-loop controlmechanismtriggered by explicit user feedback.

The deployment of sophisticated telecommunication services poses demanding design and implementation challenges to the underlying infrastructure. The end-goal of more flexibility, fault tolerance, quality of services, intelligence, component-based service integration, service personalization, programmability, openness and of course security in a heterogeneous infrastructure can be reasonably achieved via active and programmable networks. In this paper, we first investigate an integrated architecture for active and programmable network infrastructures that is based on mobile agent technology. Subsequently we present a security architecture for our node and comment on its functionality and technology choices made. At the end a dynamic VPN deployment with nomadic user support scenario is analyzed in order to argue about the pros and cons offered by this approach.

Σήμερα, βρισκόμαστε ήδη στο στάδιο μετάβασης από τις παραδοσιακές επιτραπέζιες υπολογιστικές τεχνολογίες στα διάχυτα (ubiquitous) υπολογιστικά περιβάλλοντα που θα μας υποστηρίζουν σχεδόν σε κάθε καθημερινή μας λειτουργία ή δραστηριότητα. Παράλληλα, υπάρχει μία αυξανόμενη τάση για τοποθέτηση του χρήστη στο κέντρο των υπηρεσιών. Αυτό σημαίνει ότι οι υπηρεσίες θα προσαρμόζονται με βάση το στενό και ευρύτερο περιβάλλον διαβίωσης (context), τις ανάγκες και τις προτιμήσεις των χρηστών. Δύο από τις βασικότερες έννοιες στις οποίες βασίζεται η προσφορά διάχυτων εξατομικευμένων υπηρεσιών είναι η γνώση πλαισίου (context awareness) και η μοντελοποίηση χρηστών (user modeling). Η έλευση του διάχυτου υπολογισμού και η χρησιμοποίηση της διάχυτης μοντελοποίησης χρηστών (ubiquitous user modeling) έχει δημιουργήσει νέες προσδοκίες και προκλήσεις για την παροχή εξατομικευμένων υπηρεσιών σε πολλούς τομείς εφαρμογών μεταξύ των οποίων είναι και ο τομέας της υγείας. Η ιατρική αντιμετώπιση αλλάζει πλέον κατεύθυνση και γίνεται προστατευτική, προληπτική και εύκολα προσεγγίσιμη (π.χ. στη δουλειά, στο σπίτι, κλπ.), συνοδευόμενη από συνεχή και εμμένουσα παροχή υψηλής ποιότητας εξατομικευμένης ιατρικής συμβουλής και υποστήριξης. Οι σύγχρονες ιατρικές υπηρεσίες αναμένονται να είναι διαθέσιμες κάθε στιγμή, 7 ημέρες την εβδομάδα και να παρέχονται με έναν εξατομικευμένο τρόπο ώστε να απευθύνονται στις ιδιαίτερες ανάγκες και απαιτήσεις κάθε ατόμου. Η παρούσα διατριβή πραγματεύεται μία μεθοδολογία παροχής διάχυτων υπηρεσιών σε εξελιγμένα τηλεπικοινωνιακά δίκτυα που συνδυάζει τη γνώση πλαισίου, τη μοντελοποίηση χρηστών και τα κοινωνικά δίκτυα (social networks). Η μεθοδολογία αυτή εφαρμόστηκε στον ιατρικό χώρο και ειδικότερα στις διαταραχές άγχους. Πιο συγκεκριμένα, στη διατριβή καθορίστηκαν πλήρως οι παράμετροι πλαισίου που σχετίζονται άμεσα με τις διαταραχές άγχους και προτάθηκε ένα μοντέλο πλαισίου που βασίζεται σε οντολογίες. Επίσης, μελετήθηκε η δομή και οι τεχνικές κατασκευής και ανανέωσης των μοντέλων χρηστών, ενώ μελετήθηκε η χρήση των κοινωνικών δικτύων για την παροχή ιατρικής φροντίδας και οι ρόλοι των μελών τους στις διαταραχές άγχους. Τέλος, προτάθηκε η αρχιτεκτονική ενός συστήματος γνώσης πλαισίου που ενσωματώνει τις ανωτέρω τεχνολογίες, τμήμα του οποίου αναπτύχθηκε, υλοποιήθηκε και αξιολογήθηκε από επαγγελματίες ιατρούς. Κατά την εφαρμογή της παραπάνω μεθοδολογίας στις διαταραχές άγχους αναπτύχθηκε η εφαρμογή PerMed που αποτελεί ένα εργαλείο αρχειοθέτησης και επεξεργασίας των προσωπικών πληροφοριών των ασθενών και τέσσερις υπηρεσίες που στοχεύουν στην υποστήριξη της θεραπείας των διαταραχών άγχους. Οι τρεις εστιάζουν στην ανακάλυψη πιθανών συσχετίσεων στα δεδομένα πλαισίου, ενώ η τέταρτη στοχεύει στην πρόβλεψη του άγχους που θα παρουσιάσει ένας ασθενής σε ένα δεδομένο πλαίσιο. Τα σχόλια που λάβαμε από επαγγελματίες ψυχιάτρους είναι αρκετά ενθαρρυντικά και ευελπιστούμε ότι η προτεινόμενη προσέγγιση θα αποτελέσει ένα ισχυρό εργαλείο υποστήριξης της θεραπείας των διαταραχών άγχους. Today, we are already on the transition from the traditional desktop-based computing technologies towards ubiquitous computing environments that will enfold us in almost all our daily situations and activities. Simultaneously, there exists an increased tendency of putting the user into the center of service delivery. This means that the services in the ubiquitous environments should be adapted to the context, the needs and the preferences of users. Two of the key-concepts, based on which the delivery of ubiquitous personalized services is realized, are context-awareness and user modeling. The emergence of ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous user modeling has created new expectations and challenges for the delivery of personalized services in a considerable amount of application domains, among which is the healthcare domain. Healthcare provision changes direction becoming protective, proactive and more reachable (e.g. at home or at work), accompanied by continuous and persistent provision of personalized high-quality health advice and assistance. Modern healthcare services are expected to be available around the clock, seven days a week and delivered in a personalized manner addressing the specific needs and preferences of each individual. The present dissertation presents a methodology of providing ubiquitous services at advanced telecommunication networks, which combines context-awareness, user modeling and social networks. This methodology was implemented in the healthcare domain and more specifically in anxiety disorders. In particular, in this dissertation, the contextual aspects that are directly associated with anxiety disorders were defined and an ontology-based context model was proposed. In addition, the user models’ structure was determined and the techniques for the processing of their content were developed. Furthermore, the use of social networks in anxiety disorders and the role of their members were studied. Finally, the architecture of a context-aware system that integrates all the above technologies was proposed, a part of which was developed, implemented and evaluated by professional psychiatrists. During the implementation of the proposed methodology in anxiety disorders, the PerMed application that provides medical experts with a tool for archiving and processing the patient’s personal data and four treatment supportive services were developed. The three of them focus on the discovery of possible associations between the patient’s contextual data and the last service aims at predicting the stress level a patient might suffer from, in a given context. The feedback received from expertized psychiatrists was very encouraging and we hope that the proposed approach will constitute a powerful treatment supportive tool for anxiety disorders.

International audience; A franchisor has the difficult task to balance concept uniformity and adaptation to local customer needs. In an attempt to improve their own competitiveness and profitability, franchisees are often tempted to resort to opportunistic behaviors, through deviations from brand standards. Since brand integrity is critical in business-format franchising this is a critical issue for franchisors. The purpose of this paper is to investigate an opportunity for franchisors to improve franchisees satisfaction and their commitment to core brand standards by granting them freedom to control the service aspect of the business. Peripheral by nature, services can indeed tolerate deviation from standards without concept infringement. The empirical research in this article, verified through two different datasets, shows that service personalization is a viable option for franchisees in the quick-service restaurant (QSR) industry as a way to improve both customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

Situation awareness is a promising approach to recommend to a mobile user the most suitable resources for a specific situation. However, determining the correct user situation is not a simple task since users have different habits that may affect the way in which the situations arise. Thus, an appropriate tuning aimed at adapting the situation recognizer to the specific user is desirable to make a resource recommender more effective. In this paper, we show how this objective can be achieved by collecting data during the interaction of the user with the mobile device and using this context history to personalize the resource recommender by a genetic algorithm. To describe our approach, we adopt a recently proposed resource recommender which exploits fuzzy linguistic variables to manage the inherent vagueness of some contextual parameters. Experimental results on a real business case show that the responsiveness and modeling capabilities of the recommender increase, thus validating the proposed approach.

International audience; Improving customer satisfaction and customer loyalty is a serious challenge for fast-food restaurants. Traditionally quick-service restaurants have focused on productivity without paying much attention to personalization of goods and services. However, it is critical to understand what really matters to the customers and what can be done to keep them satisfied and loyal. The purpose of this paper is to assess the impact of customization of goods and services on customer satisfaction in fast-food franchising. Selecting fast-food franchises for the empirical research was a deliberate choice since business-format franchises are traditionally organized in a uniform manner where deviations from standards are typically discouraged. The key question is to understand whether a certain level of personalization is nevertheless expected by their customers and whether customization could positively impact customer satisfaction in spite of implementation challenges one could expect

As ICT services are becoming more ubiquitous and mobile and access technologies grow to be more heterogeneous and complex, we are witnessing the increasing importance of two related needs: (i) users need to be able to configure and personalize their services with minimal effort; (ii) operators desire to engineer and manage their networks easily and efficiently, limiting human agency as far as possible. We propose a possible solution to reach these goals. Our vision, developed in the so-called Simplicity project, is based on a personalization device, which, together with a brokerage framework, offers transparent service configuration and runtime adaptation, according to user preferences and computing/networking context conditions. The capabilities of this framework can be exploited: (i) on the user side, to personalize services, to improve the portability of services over heterogeneous terminals and devices, to adapt services to available networking and terminal technologies; (ii) on the network side, to give operators more powerful tools to define new solutions for distributed, technology-independent, self-organizing, autonomic networking systems. Such systems could be designed so as to be able to react autonomously to changing contexts and environments. In this paper, we first describe the main aspects of the Simplicity solution. We then want to show that our approach is indeed viable. To prove this point, we present an application which exploits the capabilities of the Simplicity system: a mechanism to drive mobile users towards the most appropriate point of access to the network, taking into account both user preferences and network context. We use simulation to evaluate the performance of this procedure in a specific case study, where the aim is to balance the load in an 802.11b access network scenario. The numerical results show the effectiveness of the proposed procedure when compared to a legacy scenario and to another solution from literature. To give ample proof of the feasibility of our solution, we also designed and implemented a real prototype. The prototype enables not only the load to be balanced among different 802.11 access points, but also network and application services to be differentiated as a function of user profiles and network load. The main aspects of this prototype are presented in this paper.

Distributed computing environments are becoming more heterogeneous due to the integration of different wireless and fixed networks and variety of terminal devices that can be used to access content and services on the Internet. Also, increasing user expectations of personalizable, adaptive, and context-aware mobile services bring complexity to the development of future mobile services. The distributed and heterogeneous computing environment, together with increasing user expectations, set requirements for future mobile services that are difficult to meet without service platform support alleviating service development. In this work, a lightweight distributed service platform that has been designed with a practical design approach to support the adaptation of mobile services, and partly also personalization and context-aware functionalities of the services, is presented. A requirement analysis for future mobile services is carried out by an extensive literature review. The mobile service adaptation support functionality of the service platform is designed based on the identified requirements. Further architecture based on the concept of Generic Service Elements is designed for the service platform. The validation of the architecture is achieved by a prototype implementation. The validation was successfully achieved by the prototype implementation. It also proved the service platform's applicability to resource-constrained distributed mobile computing environments as the prototype resulted in an overall size of less than 360 KB, of which approximately one third is allocated to the mobile terminal domain.

Distributed computing environments are becoming more heterogeneous due to the integration of different wireless and fixed networks and variety of terminal devices that can be used to access content and services on the Internet. Also, increasing user expectations of personalizable, adaptive, and context-aware mobile services bring complexity to the development of future mobile services. The distributed and heterogeneous computing environment, together with increasing user expectations, set requirements for future mobile services that are difficult to meet without service platform support alleviating service development. In this work, a lightweight distributed service platform that has been designed with a practical design approach to support the adaptation of mobile services, and partly also personalization and context-aware functionalities of the services, is presented. A requirement analysis for future mobile services is carried out by an extensive literature review. The mobile service adaptation support functionality of the service platform is designed based on the identified requirements. Further architecture based on the concept of Generic Service Elements is designed for the service platform. The validation of the architecture is achieved by a prototype implementation. The validation was successfully achieved by the prototype implementation. It also proved the service platform's applicability to resource-constrained distributed mobile computing environments as the prototype resulted in an overall size of less than 360 KB, of which approximately one third is allocated to the mobile terminal domain.