Case - Based Reasoning in Corporate Support

Help desk systems are one of the most successful application areas of case-based reasoning. However, case-based reasoning techniques cover only parts of the whole help desk scenario. One missing part is providing access to the technical documentation. Combining these becomes especially important in the area of service support systems, where the service person has no access to the printed documentation. This paper presents the general structure of Ams, a case-based support system for cooling lubricant manufacturers' sales representatives. Ams is based on a variant of CBR which in the following will be calledstructured CBR. This variant diiers from more classical CBR approaches by incorporating knowledge of a certain domain in order to structure cases and to provide a more semantic similarity measure. With the development of the personal computer in the early 80s the need for supporting new kind of users, i. e. managers, technicians, secretaries, arose. Therefore many companies created Information Centers, to assist and control the use of PCs within the company. The rst systems used by the Information Centers were database management systems to help with the information about the clients hard-and software. With the advent of expert systems intelligent job aids for Information Centers could be developed. Thus expert system theorists called these systems diagnostic expert systems, training assistants called them intelligent job aids, and the people at TIs Information Center 1 called them help desks. First used for computer-related problems, help desks today can refer to any computer-based system that aids people in providing assistance via phone. Users needing advice contact 2 a human operator or Customer Service Representative 3. In a simple operation the CSR listens to the user describing the problem, and then provides a recommendation based on his experience. Unfortunately, such operators are hard to nd. Moreover, as equipment gets more complex, it's hard to nd anyone to man a help desk who really understands everything a user might ask about. Most CSRs know how to deal with the standard, frequent questions and rely on manuals and notes to come up with a solution for harder, less frequent problems. Creating a help desk system therefore is the task to assist the CSR with retrieving and storing with the following kinds of information: Information about events and users This means storing and retrieving records of user conngurations, contacts, etc. Information about products and services Information of that kind is provided with the technical …