Building on-line sales assistance systems with ADVISOR SUITE

Online sales advisory systems guide customers through the decision and buying process and provide added value for online customers, especially in domains where a wide range of comparable products is available and differentiation between the products requires deep technical knowledge. In this paper we present ADVISOR SUITE, an expert system that combines knowledge-based approaches for personalized product recommendation with an adaptive user interface, which is used to guide the customer through the requirements elicitation process according to his personal needs and preferences. A particular focus of the presented system lies on the reduction of costly knowledge engineering and maintenance times, which is addressed by a consistent set of graphical tools, and a personalization approach that enables the automatic generation of large parts of the user interface of the advisory application