What is the Automatic Mail Responder?
The AutoMailResponder is a Lotus Notes application that exploits Lotus Notes programmability and data base capabilities, using a Document Similarity Engine (DSE), to provide a simple solution to a cumbersome and heavy, manually-oriented task: queries that cannot be matched in a mail system, are transferred to Helpdesk agents for manual handling.
The AutoMailResponder can be implemented on any mail system, although our first implementation is based on Lotus Notes.
The responder can be implemented in one of two ways:
- Automatically - a Lotus Notes agent (i.e., a process) handles all incoming mail, answers mail that has matched answers, and transfers only those mail items that do not have a matched answer, to a human agent.
- As an assistant tool - all incoming mail queries are transferred to a human agent, and the AutoMailResponder is used by the human agents as an assistant tool to find the right response. In this mode, the AutoMailResponder enhances the productivity of the Helpdesk or the technical team, by helping them to answer all incoming mail.
The software is composed of several components:
- Q&A databases with questions and answers. Every answer is linked to one or more questions.
- A Lotus Notes server agent, which intercepts every incoming note to the target e-mail id, and extracts the text of the question.
- A Document Similarity Engine, which searches for the most similar question in the questions database.
- An agent that generates a reply to the originator of a question and gives the appropriate answer based on the results of the DSE.
What is the AutoMail Responder good for?
The goal of the AutoMailResponder is to improve customer support by providing answers that are accurate, returned within a short period of time, and reduce the cost of support to companies. Many companies suffer from an inability to answer all the mail directed to them, and need to allocate substantial resources for this task. One of many articles published on this subject is titled: "Queries ? Yes, Answers ? Maybe".
The AutoMailResponder provides both an automatic and a manual tool for the Helpdesk team. It saves a lot of effort by having an e-mail account that automatically responds to a large number of e-mails, or can present the Helpdesk agent with ready answers that can be incorporated in the responses to questions/requests. It is most likely that a Helpdesk team will start to use the e-mail responder in manual mode, and move to automatic mode once they have reached a high level of confidence and trust in the system. Through its Information Retrieval (IR) technology and, use of its Document Similarity Engine, developed at the IBM Haifa Research Labs (HRL), the AutoMailResponder assists call center agents and enables end users to get immediate responses that have a high degree of accuracy.
This solution is a Customer Care solution targeted for companies that publish their e-mail address either on the Internet, or any other way. These companies are flooded with mail and suffer from both the lack and cost of human resources needed to answer all the mail.
With AutoMailResponder, progressive enhancement of the content of question and answer databases is enabled by allowing a continuous update of databases with new questions and answers.
Requirements
- Lotus Notes Server
- Lotus Notes ID to be used as the automatic mailing address