Automatic Letter Composition for Customer Service
Stephen B. Springer, Paul Buta, Thomas C. Wolf · 1991
Corporations worldwide have seen a sharply increasing need for cus-tomized client correspondence in recent years. Financial institutions, mail-order companies, legal firms—any corporation that maintains a Customer Service Department—must generate written correspon-dence that clearly communicates specific, individualized information to clients. Indeed, in a slumping economy, much has been made of the need to differentiate one’s business from the competition by providing higher-quality customer service (Agins et al. 1990). However, the indus-try continues to express this commitment through a combination of awkward form letters and expensive original letters composed by hand. This chapter describes an application of Cognitive Systems ’ Intelligent Correspondence Generator (ICG), which has increased the quality, re-duced the complexity, and drastically cut the turnaround time associat-ed with the production of personalized letters at its installation site. Users with little or no training in business correspondence can invoke the system to automatically compose complete, high-quality letters specifically tailored to the addressee’s situation.