Telephone-based customer support has been a major source of expenditure for most companies. In recent years, with the growing popularity of the Internet and the World Wide Web, companies have started exploring ways to reduce telephone-based customer support costs by directing customers to a website. In this paper, we present the architecture, design and implementation of SupportBeam, an infrastructure to provide web-based customer support. SupportBeam uses a rule-based approach to provide a personalized web experience to users seeking answers to their questions. We use applicability rules to specify relationships between documents and products, and evaluate these rules at runtime to generate a personalized web experience. Our approach provides a scalable and flexible solution for web-based customer support with an improved user experience at low cost.
By: Ajay Mohindra, Thomas E. Chefalas, Alexei A. Karve, Quentin Gouedard, Steve Mastrianni
Published in: RC22063 in 2001
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