Advisor Suite: A Tool for Rapid Development of Maintainable Online Sales Advisory Systems

A sales advisory system is a tool supporting customers in the decision-making and buying process by interactive and personalized requirements elicitation and the provision of comprehensible product proposals and explanations. The particular challenges when building such systems lie in the strong interdependencies between the recommendation and personalization logic and the corresponding adaptive, web-based user interface. The Advisor Suite tool described in this paper is a system that follows a consistent knowledge-based approach for all tasks that are required to build such intelligent sales advisory systems for arbitrary domains. The development of advisory applications is based on a conceptual model of online sales dialogues, a “Model-View-Controller” application architecture, a generic controller component, as well as (semi-)automatic, template-based web page generation. Experiences from various real-world applications show that the knowledge-based approach and the corresponding graphical tools of Advisor Suite significantly accelerate the development and maintenance process for such applications.