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Siebel Smart Answer Modules

Siebel Smart Answer is comprised of the following three main modules:

• Siebel Smart Answer Manager
• Siebel Smart Answer Server
• Siebel Smart Answer Administration Tool

Figure 1 illustrates the relationship between the main modules.

Siebel Smart Answer Manager

Siebel Smart Answer Manager is the server component used by the Siebel application to control Siebel Smart Answer. Siebel Smart Answer Manager facilitates the detection of the meaning or intent of the following:

• Incoming free-form email inquiries for Siebel Email Response.
• Specified texts from inquiries for the employee applications such as Siebel Call Center.

Siebel Smart Answer Manager invokes Siebel Smart Answer for natural language processing (NLP) and semantic analysis services in order to do the following:

• Interpret the meaning, intent, and sentiment of email messages
• Generate concept models
• Assign a confidence level percentage

Siebel Smart Answer Manager works as follows:

1. Siebel Smart Answer Manager receives text input. For example, Siebel Smart Answer Manager might receive an email.
2. Siebel Smart Answer passes the message to the natural language processing engine, Siebel Smart Answer. The NLP engine compares the concepts extracted from the message to the concept model for each of the categories (the knowledge base model).
3. The NLP engine categorizes the emails based on the concept model comparison.
4. Siebel Smart Answer returns categories to the Siebel Smart Answer Manager who then passes categories with a confidence-level score to Siebel Business Applications, such as Siebel Email Response. This percentage represents the probability that the text falls within that category.

NOTE:  Extremely short text strings might return inconsistent results because there is little content to analyze.

If the confidence level of the accuracy of a category is high, you might want Siebel Email Response to automatically respond directly to the sender. If the confidence level is not high, Siebel Smart Answer might suggest responses to an agent for approval.

For Siebel Call Center, Siebel Smart Answer sends the text from the Summary field of the service request to Siebel Smart Answer for categorization when the agent selects the option, "Siebel Smart Answer". This opens Search Center for Siebel Smart Answer and a list of suggested solutions appears. To send feedback to Siebel Smart Answer, the agent selects the option, "Was this information helpful?"

Siebel Smart Answer Server

Siebel Smart Answer Server is the natural language processing engine that Siebel Smart Answer Manager invokes for any incoming service request. The service requests are compared to a concept model or knowledge base model for each of the categories. Each category is assigned a confidence score for matching the incoming request. The Siebel Smart Answer Server is able to receive feedback from the Siebel Smart Answer Manager in order to improve and tune its underlying concept model to the customer service operating environment. For more information on installing and administering Siebel Smart Answer, see Installing and Administering Siebel Smart Answer.

Siebel Smart Answer Administration Tool

The Siebel Smart Answer Administration Tool provides all the required functionality for creating and managing a corpus, creating and maintaining categories, building, tuning and exporting a knowledge base, and monitoring the run time effectiveness of the exported knowledge base. All of this functionality is exposed in an easy to use GUI interface. With the Siebel Smart Answer Administration Tool, the corpus, the knowledge base model, and the knowledge base file created for use by the Siebel Smart Answer Server and the Siebel Smart Answer Manager components. For more information on how to use the Siebel Smart Answer Administration Tool, see Using the Siebel Smart Answer Administration Tool.