Selling financial services requires deep knowledge about the product domain as well as about potential wishes and needs of customers. In the financial services domain (especially in the retail sector) sales representatives can differ greatly in their expertise and level of sales knowledge. Therefore financial service providers ask for tools effectively supporting sales representatives in the dialog with the customer. In this paper we present technologies which allow a flexible mapping of product, marketing and sales knowledge to the representation of a recommender knowledge-base thus providing an infrastructure for the interactive selling of financial services. Furthermore, we report experiences gained from financial service recommender development projects.

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Abstract. Web-based sales assistance systems are a valuable means to guide online customers in the decision-making and product selection process. Conversational recommenders simulate the behavior of an experienced sales expert, which is a knowledge-intensive task and requires personalized user interaction according to the customers' needs and skills. In this paper, we present the AD-VISOR SUITE framework for rapid development of conversational recommenders for arbitrary domains. In the system, both the recommendation logic and the knowledge required for constructing the personalized dialog and adaptive web pages is contained in a declarative knowledge-base. The advisory application can be completely modeled using graphical tools based on a conceptual model of online sales dialogs. A template mechanism supports the automatic construction of maintainable dynamic web pages. At run-time, a controller component generically steers the interaction flow. Practical experiences from several commercial installations of the system show that development times and costs for online sales advisory systems can be significantly reduced when following the described knowledge-based approach.

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Abstract:Large product variety in mass customization involves a high internal complexity level inside a company's operations, as well as a high external complexity level from a customer's perspective. To cope with both complexity problems, an information system based on agent technology is able to be identified as a suitable solution approach. The mass customized products are assumed to be based on a modular architecture and each module variant is associated with an autonomous rational agent. Agents have to compete with each other in order to join coalitions representing salable product variants which suit real customers' requirements. The negotiation process is based on a market mechanism supported by the target costing concept and a Dutch auction. Furthermore, in order to integrate the multi-agent system in the existing information system landscape of the mass customizer, a technical architecture is proposed and a scenario depicting the main communication steps is specified.