Providing Answers is the Answer

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It seems obvious, but the most important part of any CRM strategy should be to answer your customers' queries and concerns. Failure there means lost customers-end of game. For most products and customers, the primary interaction is to answer

common support, policy or utilization questions or handle complaints. Customers generally perceive these as "Simple Questions" that they should be able to easily have answered, and if they could talk to the appropriate expert that would be the case. But too often customers cannot find their answers on the company website or reach someone authoritative, and they end up frustrated with the product and the company.

The fundamental issue is that while each customer's question may seem relatively simple, there are vast numbers of variations and special cases. The overall complexity is too great for support staff to fully learn, understand or remember-even with the various search technologies available. When advice changes with time, or is "probabilistic," it becomes even more impractical to expect staff or customers to master it. A few key company experts know the answers, but they are not generally available.

It's time for a paradigm shift - Knowledge Automation. Stop trying to make customers and staff into experts by just providing them with lots of data and expecting them to learn it. Instead, fully describe the product/business expert's decision-making processes in a way that can be delivered automatically online, emulating a conversation with the expert to produce precise, accurate, consistent advice.

This is exactly what Exsys® Inc has been helping companies do for 25 years. The key to capturing expert knowledge in a complete usable way is a development environment that enables experts (not programmers) to easily and systematically describe how they solve problems and provide advice. Exsys Corvid® uses English and algebra to create easy-to-read, structured decision-making rules. Corvid even shows where there are gaps in the logic, and a rapid "Build-Test-Refine" process helps the expert expand the system to cover all the possible special cases. It builds all the files to field systems online as part of a company website using the Exsys Inference Engine.

Customers and staff simply run the Exsys knowledge automation system with their web browser and it will interact as if they were talking to the expert one-on-one. It will ask focused questions and provide detailed situation-specific advice. Users don't have to sift through pages of information or become experts themselves-they just answer the system's questions and get precise, logically reasoned recommendations. Customers get the answers they need quickly and easily; and business staffs have access to the knowledge they need to do their jobs.

Many of the largest companies and government agencies are using Exsys Knowledge Automation to move their websites to the next level of interaction and advice-providing their customers with easy access to answers and advice to solve support problems, meet regulatory requirements, implement best practices, and keep the customer satisfied.

Contact: Exsys Inc. * 6301 Indian School Rd. NE * Suite 700 * Albuquerque, NM 87110 * Tel: +1.505.888.9494 * www.exsys.com

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By Dustin Huntington

PRESIDENT, EXSYS INC.