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.
Customers interacting with online selling platforms require the assistance of sales support systems in the product and service selection process. Knowledge-based recommenders are specific sales support systems which involve online customers in dialogs with the goal to support preference forming processes. These systems have been successfully deployed in commercial environments supporting the recommendation of, e.g., financial services, e-tourism services, or consumer goods. However, the development of user interface descriptions and knowledge bases underlying knowledge-based recommenders is often an error-prone and frustrating business. In this paper we focus on the first aspect and present an approach which supports knowledge engineers in the identification of faults in user interface descriptions. These descriptions are the input for a model-based diagnosis algorithm which automatically identifies faulty elements and indicates those elements to the knowledge engineer. In addition, we present results of an empirical study which demonstrates the applicability of our approach.
Recommenders support effective product retrieval processes for online users. These systems propose repair actions in situations where no solution can be found and derive recommendations including a set of explanations as to why a certain product has been selected. In this context utility constraints (scoring rules) have to be defined which specify the way utilities of products, explanations, and repair alternatives are determined. Such constraints can be faulty which means that they calculate rankings in a way not expected by marketing and sales experts. The maintenance and repair of such constraints is an extremely error-prone task. In this paper we present an intelligent environment which supports the automated adaptation of faulty utility constraints taking into account existing marketing and sales requirements. In this context we discuss experiences from commercial projects.
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