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

Abstract

This paper describes an Electronic Butler (or e-Butler) that provides a customer-centric personalized shopping services to its subscribers across a wide range of products. This service is provided by identifying individual customer's shopping needs from the comprehensive purchasing history of that person 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 provides purchasing recommendations to the customer and the Magic Wand (MW) service that directly makes purchases it believes the customer needs without any prior consultations with the customer. In order to understand how PSA and MW services of e-Butler are related to the existing one-to-one marketing and recommender systems, a general framework classifying various personalized shopping services is presented that clearly delineates PSA and MW services from these existing systems. Moreover, the paper presents an architecture of the e-Butler service, explains what its business value is, discusses its feasibility, and describes what needs to be done to make it a successful service.