Automatic Letter Composition for Customer Service

Corporations worldwide have seen a sharply increasing need for cus-tomized client correspondence in recent years. Financial institutions, mail-order companies, legal firms—any corporation that maintains a Customer Service Department—must generate written correspondence that clearly communicates specific, individualized information to clients. Indeed, in a slumping economy, much has been made of the need to differentiate one's business from the competition by providing higher-quality customer service (Agins et al. 1990). However, the industry continues to express this commitment through a combination of awkward form letters and expensive original letters composed by hand. This chapter describes an application of Cognitive Systems' Intelligent Correspondence Generator (ICG), which has increased the quality, reduced the complexity, and drastically cut the turnaround time associated with the production of personalized letters at its installation site. Users with little or no training in business correspondence can invoke the system to automatically compose complete, high-quality letters specifically tailored to the addressee's situation.