Customer Decision Making in Web Services

Abstract

Web services play an important role in successful business integration and other application fields such as e-commerce and e-business. Customer decision making (CDM) is an indispensable factor for e-business and Web services. This chapter examines customer decision making in Web services. More specifically, it first looks at decision making in Web services, and proposes a novel P6 model for CDM in Web services, which consists of 6 Ps: privacy, perception, propensity, preference, personalization, and promised experience. This model integrates the existing 6 P elements of marketing mix as the environment of customer decision making in Web services. The new integrated P6 model deals with the inner world of the customer for decision making (DM) and incorporates what the customer sees and thinks during a DM process. The purpose of this novel P6 model is to assist customers in the decision process to acquire the most satisfactory Web service. This chapter also examines case-based decision making in Web services and provides a theoretical foundation for case-based decision making under the condition of one problem with multiple solutions in Web services. The proposed approach will facilitate research and development of e-business, Web services, decision support systems, intelligent systems, and soft computing.