The system analyzes the wording of the question and looks for similar questions in its database. It then displays four or five questions it thinks are most similar to the one that is being asked.
Customers click on an icon next to the appropriate question to read the answer.
So that's thousands of phone calls that would have been added, so I basically would have needed another person to handle this kind of volume, if not more. The call center receives about 200 calls per day, and the agents also handle e-mail queries and live Web chat to support the site, which offers products for expectant families and infants and receives about 400,000 visits per month. BabyUniverse loaded the database with about 20 questions and answers before the system was deployed, Closner said, and more questions and answers are added as more questions are asked. Once an agent answers a question through either of those means, the agent decides whether to add the question and answer to the AskIt database. But if it's a generic question that will probably be asked again, we add it to the database.