Project Case Study
Provider Name: KALKI Communication Technologies
Client Name: Qsupport
Project Title: Expert System Development
PART I: The Problem
Qsupport is a customer support company. Personal as well as corporate customers send queries on various
software and hardware related problems by e-mail. Qsupport has got a support team, members of which will
go through the e-mails and reply the questions posed by the customers. In case the support person does not
have an answer at hand, he will go through appropriate reference material and find out the answer. Since all
questions asked and answers sent were stored in a database, this database was the primary reference
material. Qsupport was using a simple word search program to search this database and find appropriate
questions. The database grew in size and contained around 15,000 questions and their answers. This sharply
brought down the accuracy of the keyword search system and the cycle time between receiving a query and
answering it (which is a crucial performance parameter for Qsupport) started to go up. It was to counter this
that Qsupport turned to Kalki for an expert system.
PART II: The Solution
The objective was to cut down the time it took to locate questions and answers in the database once a query
was received. The problem with a simple keyword search was that too many matches would be found
requiring the user a good amount of time to go through each of them. So to develop a more sophisticated
search was the primary objective. At the same time some automation of the answer retrieval was desired so
that cycle time in answering a query could be further reduced. The end result was an expert system which
when prompted with a new query, will search the existing database and find out the most accurate questions
(and their answers). Since the whole text of the e-mail was fed to the expert system, it was not required of the
user to identify and type in keywords to be searched. Since the expert system used an advanced algorithm for
searching incorporating Na