Koba4MS: Knowledge-based Recommenders for Marketing and Sales

Due to the increasing size and complexity of products offered by online stores and electronic marketplaces, the identification of solutions fitting to the wishes and needs of a customer is a challenging task. Customers can differ greatly in their expertise and level of knowledge w.r.t. the product domain which requires sales assistance systems allowing personalized dialogs, explanations and repair proposals in the case of inconsistent requirements. In this context, knowledge-based recommenders allow a flexible mapping of product, marketing and sales knowledge to the formal representation of a knowledge base. This paper presents the knowledge-based recommender environment Koba4MS which assists customers and sales representatives in the identification of appropriate solutions. Based on application examples from the domain of financial services, basic Koba4MS technologies are presented which support the effective implementation of customer-oriented sales dialogs.