Knowledge-Intensive Product Search and Customization in Electronic Commerce

A major requirement of today’s online shops is the availability of competent virtual sales agents that guide the customers through the vast space of available products, services and other opportunities. This function is mostly implemented by search agents that should help customers to find relevant product information. While these search functions are considered quite important by the online sellers, the quality of the retrieval results is miserable [4]. The key to enhancing search quality and, more generally, to approaching the vision of intelligent, knowledgeable virtual sales agents, is to incorporate more knowledge about products, customers and the sales process into the sales agent. The quality of service becomes the dominating factor for achieving customer satisfaction and a good customer relationship. As a consequence customer relationship management [9] and knowledge management [10, 3] have been recognized as core disciplines with strategic importance for successful future business. In the context of companies which communicate with heir customers and partners via electronic online media, this requires one to make the company knowledge available and visible through the virtual agents that are supposed to be the primary access points to the company. This chapter describes a knowledge-based technology and related applications for developing intelligent virtual sales agents.