Towards Effectiveness and Transparency in E-Business Transactions: An Ontology for Customer Complaint Management

Current Situation

The use of the Internet for cross-border business is growing rapidly. However, in many cases, the benefits of electronic commerce are not exploited fully by customers because of the frequent lack of trust and confidence in online cross-border purchases. To achieve fair trading and transparency in commercial communications and transactions, effective cross-border complaint platforms need to be established and involved in e-business activities (Claes, 1987) (Cho et al, 2002) (ABA, 2002).

The CCFORM project aims to study and reach a consensus about the foundation of online customer complaint mechanisms by developing a general but extensible form (called CC-form¹) which has widespread industry and customer support. This CC-form must facilitate cross-language communication to support cross-border e-commerce and should be easy to implement in software tools. The CC-form will raise the basic agreement about complaint handling, and should be extended in vertical markets (e.g. hotels, banks, factories, or even governments) to provide sector-wide solutions to allow service providers to gain competitive advantages (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Depiction of the CCform design

Problem Statement

There are several challenges involved in establishing and agreeing on such a CC-form: (1) Legal bases: the sensitivity of cross-border business regulations and privacy issues. (2) The diversity of language and culture: controlling and agreeing on the semantics of the complaint terminology so that the intended meaning of the term gets across, even in the different languages. (3) Consumer sensitivity and business perspectives. (4) Extensibility: the flexibility of extending the CC-form (perhaps dynamically) according to market needs and standards. This would mean for example, extending the kinds of problems that a complainant can complain about, extending the kinds of complaint resolutions, managing who may extend what, etc.

Proposed Solution

In order to tackle such challenges and to perfect the reference model for a CC-form, the research has been divided into six interest groups, each consisting of 10-15 highly specialized members. Each group has been intensively discussing different issues: SIG1- Legal Affairs, SIG2- Consumer Affairs, SIG4 - Standards for SMEs, SIG5 -Alternative Dispute Resolution Systems, SIG6 - Ontology and Extensibility, SIG7 - Vertical markets.

The work presented in this chapter outlines our main achievements in the “Ontology and extensibility” group, including multilingual and cultural issues (Jarrar et al, 2003). The mission of this group, SIG6, is to undertake extensibility and multilingual demands. To approach this, a customer complaint ontology (CContology) has been developed and lexicalized in 11 European languages. This CContology is developed and reviewed by the six interest groups, and is seen as a conceptual framework that is necessary to develop such a CC-form.

In the following section, we present the CContology itself and the methodology we applied to engineer it. In section 3, we provide some lessons learnt and a discussion about our applied engineering solutions. Section 4 presents a multilingual lexicalization methodology. To end, section 6 presents our conclusions and directions for future work.