Gartner Group forecasts worldwide online holiday shopping revenue to surpass $19.5 billion this year. However, many companies may lose their share of this business because they continue to segregate e-business from mainstream sales and service operations. "A customer should have a consistent level of interaction with your company at every touch point --- Web, online chat, e-mail, kiosk, telephone, mail, fax, point-of-sale, or any combination of these methods," said Tim Panagos, Director of Technology Evolution for Pegasystems, a rules-based eCRM company. "Customers judge you by how consistently you deal with them, so systems must be able to span all levels of contact."

While St. Nick always seems to know everyone's wants and needs, in the e-business world, it's very difficult to compile one customer record in one place. "It's vital, though, that your customer service personnel gain access to a consistent view of customer information -- without regard to how and where that data is stored," said Panagos. "In addition, a single change in customer information, such as an address update, should ripple throughout the system into every database."

To help Santa's elves integrate customer processes, a number of vendors are providing products to manage every stage of the customer relationship: initial contact, lead processing, customer acquisition, fulfillment, ongoing marketing activities, and customer service. Complete eCRM solutions can integrate the Web, call centers, and other front-office operations with multiple back-end data stores and applications--despite disparate sources or inconsistent representations of customer data.

"That's where rules-based processing shines through," Panagos said. "Rules-based processing turns your core logic into a business asset by defining what your business is about and how you want to treat each type of customer. For example, if on your Website you employ a set of business rules to show a specific customer a certain set of ads, the same rules should apply if that person contacts your call center."

In addition, a rules-based implementation is highly responsive to changes in the business environment. "Making a change in only one place will be reflected throughout the enterprise to provide a consistent look and feel -- without having to recode software."

"This is an entirely different IT approach," Panagos says of rules-based customer relationship management. "Instead of looking at solving an address change problem for ten separate applications, by initiating ten different coding projects, a business analyst can make one central rules-based change that permeates throughout the enterprise."

Adopting a rules-based approach ensures that every customer interaction triggers a chain of well-defined business processes, provides a single view of the customer to everyone throughout the organization, and simplifies the task of integrating disparate applications and data sources.

Humm, think Santa will stop bringing Dad that ugly tie every year? Naaa.