The E-Butler Service, or Has the Age of Electronic Personal Decision Making Assistants Arrived?

摘要

This paper describes an Electronic Butler (or e-Butler) that provides a customer-centric personalizedshopping services to its subscribers across a wide range of products. This service is provided byidentifying individual customer's shopping needs from the comprehensive purchasing history of thatperson and providing purchasing recommendations or direct purchasing decisions for the customer. e-Butler service consists of two components -- the Personal Shopping Assistant (PSA) service that providespurchasing recommendations to the customer and the Magic Wand (MW) service that directly makespurchases it believes the customer needs without any prior consultations with the customer. In order tounderstand how PSA and MW services of e-Butler are related to the existing one-to-one marketing andrecommender systems, a general framework classifying various personalized shopping services ispresented that clearly delineates PSA and MW services from these existing systems. Moreover, the paperpresents an architecture of the e-Butler service, explains what its business value is, discusses itsfeasibility, and describes what needs to be done to make it a successful service.