Customer Requirements Elicitation in Intelligent Electronic Sales Support Systems

The convenience of shopping on-line via the Internet has become a widely accepted view. An important aspect of automated electronic sales systems is communication with the customer. Nevertheless, customers encounter quite frequently user interfaces that are hard to use – either because they have to answer annoying or irrelevant questions or they are faced with technical jargon of manufacturers they are not able to understand. Once they have managed to articulate their needs, the system may return no products at all or a very long list of products satisfying the customers’ needs. Recently, knowledge-based systems, and in particular case-based reasoning (CBR) systems, have been recognised to alleviate these problems. They provide means for intelligent dialogs and search mechanisms, which are also able to offer alternative products (avoiding the “sorry, no matching products found” Customer Requirements Elicitation in Intelligent Electronic Sales Support Systems 245 syndrome). In this paper, we suggest a framework enabling the characterisation and comparison of various strategies for eliciting customer needs. The framework is used to briefly describe and characterise advanced commercial, state-of-thepractise applications, which are available publicly. Furthermore, we present our tool, leveraging CBR technology, behind these applications.