Providing Potential Customers with
Pre-sales Advice

Before a customer will buy a product, they want to be sure it is best option for them and meets their requirements.  Exsys Corvid Knowledge Automation systems can capture the logic and process of a top sales person, and provide an interactive web-based session with the customer.  The system asks each customer about his or her requirements and planned uses.  It can then analyze all of the available products to find the best overall products for that customer; and generate a detailed written explanation of each recommended item and how it will meet the customer’s needs.  Once the customer knows a product is right for them, they are much more likely to quickly make a purchase.

When there are many similar or related products, it can be difficult for a customer to decide what is best for them.  This confusion may delay their purchase, or they may go elsewhere.  This is particularly a problem for technical products, or ones where there are many desired features and no single product is perfect.  Ideally, the customer can talk to a knowledgeable sales person who listens to their requirements, and makes a good, reasoned recommendation of the best product for them.  However, as more and more business is done via e-commerce on web sites, it has often become almost impossible to reach a sales person to get questions answered.  Even if sales staff is available, it often takes a long time for them to become (and stay) experts on the product line.  

The “data” oriented approach to this problem is to provide lots of product specs and expect the customer to be able to understand them.  This can work in some cases, but if the product is complex or the specs in technical jargon, the customer may end up more confused than before.  Getting feedback, reviews and opinions from other customers can be helpful, but every customer’s requirements are different and what worked great for one, may not be appropriate for another.  

The solution is an Exsys Corvid Knowledge Automation system.  The expert knowledge of a top sales person can be converted to Corvid’s easy to read rule syntax, to produce a system that provides an interactive web-based session with the customer.  The system can analyze the customers’ requirements to find products that are the best overall, and generate a detailed report on each product specific to the customer’s preferences.  

Corvid has a unique powerful feature called MetaBlocks specifically for product recommendation systems.  It makes it possible to write high-level recommendation rules, keeping the details of the various products in an easily maintained spreadsheet.  When products change, simple editing of the spreadsheet will update the system.  

Best of all, MetaBlocks are very effective at combining and weighting the various customer requirements to recommend the best products, even when all customer preferences cannot be simultaneously met.  The analysis of the recommended products describes how each product meets, or does not meet, specified user requirements.  The underlying expert knowledge in the system weights the various factors so that key functional aspects of the product get higher weighting than other “nice to have” features.  A system can even let the customer control the weighting on various factors based on the importance of specific preferences.  

The Exsys Corvid approach is quite different from the “database” approach used on some sites.  Standard database techniques search a database of products to find ones that meet ALL customer specifications.  Unfortunately this approach can easily lead to a “No Products Found” message when there is no “all-feature” match for the customer.  A sales person that told customers “Sorry we don’t have anything for you” just because there was not a perfect match would not last long.  Instead, they would say “There is no product with everything you would like, but this one would be the best for you and it has the most important features.”  That is exactly the type of recommendation you get from a Corvid system. It will always find the best product, and provide the details the customer needs to make a purchase decision.   It will tell customers what is relevant and provide informed, knowledgeable recommendations, with links to appropriate collateral material that can convince the customer that they have found the right product and to purchasing processes.