A Cloud-based Business Process Automation Platform for Customer Interaction : Research, development, integration, deployment and test of a Business Process Automation platform to manage company customer relations through the cloud.

Sammanfattning: Customer relationship management is a crucial point of many businesses, and is often characterized by repetitive and monotonous actions carried out by operators. The evolution of technology, in this regard, is leading to a highly multi-channel scenario, where the entire history of interactions between the company and the customer is fragmented across different services and communication tools. This work proposes a software solution for the design of business processes aimed at the automatic management of multi-channel customer relations, through the creation of intuitive graphic maps. The development of a front-end tool for creating and editing processes is completed by the creation of a server-side interpreter, which executes the processes as needed. To meet the need to collect and exploit information regarding the various customers who interface with the system, the project involves the creation of a cloud-native profiling database, accessible from different applications through specific APIs. Finally, to compare different deployment solutions, an experimental analysis is conducted on the performance provided in different scenarios, characterized by different workloads and hosting infrastructures. The final software testing demonstrates the possibility of automating the customer-interaction processes, obtaining an effective service and guaranteeing a good user experience. The profiling database represents a precious resource of information for the execution of automatic processes, and integrates well also with other applications, thanks to its versatility. The analysis of the deployment possibilities highlights, in most test scenarios, a significant convenience of cloud solutions. To summarize, this work demonstrates the possibility of automating customer interactions through an intuitive process design, and proposes a working software solution, suggesting which technology is most appropriate for the deployment. The next step would be to extend the set of functions available to other types of communication, complete integration with new services and channels, and finalize advanced debugging and validation features.