Especially in the computer industry, customer support is expensive to provide. At the same time, customers typically wait on the phone for a long time and are usually not satisfied with the quality of responses provided. Customers deserve the best answers a company can provide. One way to provide such support is to get the questions to the right people who can provide the best answers. Email is an effective mechanism for doing this since it is inexpensive both for customers and for service providers.
Email support requires email routing.
As it stands now, someone has to read the email, figure out which expert can answer the question best and then forward the email to that expert. This routing can be done automatically using Intelligent Agents. This article shows how email or messages in general can be routed using intelligent agents. Intelligence in these agents is implemented as rules that can be changed withought changing the rest of the code. The rules shown here take both expertise and work load into consideration.