A Formal Approach to Dialogs with Online Customers
Ralph Bergmann, Sascha Schmitt · 2001
This article describes a formal approach for dynamically directed sales dialogs that avoids certain disadvantages found in online sales systems today. These disadvantages stem from an information deficit that we call a knowledge gap between the customer and the vendor. The suggested approach generates situation-dependently appropriate actions, e.g., asking the right questions, flexibly reacting on customer's decisions and also providing her with information needed. The dialog approach integrates the communication process in an accompanying search process. Furthermore, the structure of the product database is considered for question selection to focus on dialogs of reduced length, i.e. with respect to the number of questions to be asked.