The VITA Financial Services Sales Support Environment

Knowledge-based recommender technologies support customers and sales representatives in the identification of appropriate products and services. These technologies are especially useful for complex and high involvement products such as cars, computers, or financial services. In this paper we present the VITA (Virtualis Tanacsado) financial services recommendation environment which has been deployed for the Fundamenta building and loan association in Hungary. On the basis of knowledge-based recommender technologies, VITA supports sales dialogs between Fundamenta sales representatives and customers interested in financial services (e.g., loans). VITA has been developed and is maintained on the basis of an environment which supports automated testing and debugging of knowledge bases and recommender process definitions. Besides presenting the VITA environment we focus on reporting empirical results which clearly show the payoffs of the deployed application in terms of time savings in the conduction of sales dialogs.