Date published: 01.09.08 - not release date

Online Shoppers Set To Spend More Through Breakthrough Advertising And Service Solution

New Transversal Sales Engine uses advanced neural technology to increase website sales for Barclays

With £8.2 billion spent on the web in 2005 in the UK alone (Source Verdict), competition between online retailers is heating up, creating a need for flexible web solutions that increase customer engagement and sales. In response, Transversal (www.transversal.com) has launched Sales Engine, the 1st online customer service solution able to serve up targeted advertising and sales promotions in response to naturally phrased questions asked by customers via an organisation’s website.

Leading UK bank, Barclays, is the 1st customer to benefit with Transversal’s Sales Engine implemented across its main www.barclays.co.uk site. Consumers using the Transversal ‘Ask a Question’ feature are served graphic and classified-style advertising alongside answers to their queries. Crucially, adverts change automatically depending on their relevance to customer questions, or to products and services that Barclays is looking to promote. This targeted advertising is aimed at increasing cross-promotion and growing online sales of Barclays’ products. For example, questions about foreign currency accounts return adverts and offers on travel insurance, using debit cards abroad and foreign mortgages. The Barclays implementation was created in less than 2 weeks, without impacting the overall website.

Using advanced neural technology, the Transversal Sales Engine provides the right information in response to the questions customers ask, along with automated, tailored, online advertising designed to increase engagement and conversion rates. It is the easiest and most intuitive way of delivering targeted content and promotions as well as providing online customer service. It gets straight to the core of what customers want, turning previously reactive sites into proactive customer-centric sales tools.

“We appreciate that our customers are all individuals and by using the Transversal Sales Engine we are able to personalise content to exactly match their needs, based on their own questions,” commented Barnaby Davis, electronic banking director. “Sales Engine delivers invaluable information on what our customers are interested in, where it matters most – at the point of purchase.”

The Transversal Sales Engine replaces existing website Help, FAQ and Contact Us options, providing a powerful mechanism by which online customers identify their requirements of products and services through the questions they ask. Through its unique and intelligent understanding of everyday language the Sales Engine provides very specific answers to customers’ questions, while also presenting related advertising and promotions designed to capture interest and increase conversion.

“The Internet promised that the customer would be king,” commented Davin Yap, Chief Executive Officer, Transversal. “Sadly, most websites simply fail to deliver the one-to-one experience that consumers demand, forcing them to more expensive offline channels, or to online competitors. The Transversal Sales Engine makes impersonal web sites a thing of the past. It uses advanced intelligence to increase conversion rates by providing customers with tailored information that meets their needs. Implementing the Sales Engine will accelerate the growth of online sales of products and services.”

Integrating seamlessly with brand look and feel, advertisements can be in the style of graphic banners and Google style text links. Additionally, the Sales Engine enables site owners the flexibility of offering and controlling the use of alternative contact options such as web chat, call back or telephone numbers at key stages in the customer journey to further increase the chances of a sale.

Management of advertising campaigns is carried out seamlessly within the Sales Engine, which stores adverts ready to be served up automatically when customers ask a related question. Sophisticated but easy-to-use content management tools built into the product enable content start and expiry dates to be set, ensuring seamless management of new product launches or campaigns. According to Transversal, the Sales Engine is the easiest and most intuitive way for organisations to manage website advertising and promotions.

Built on a dynamic, self-organising knowledgebase the Sales Engine is easy to update and manage without specialist knowledge engineers. Implementation is fast and painless as the solution is fully hosted, simple to customise to match existing web pages and includes seeding of the knowledgebase with key questions.

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Enquiries:

Transversal
Dee Roche, Head of Marketing
Tel: +44 (0)1223 723 388
Email: dee.roche@transversal.com

Rainier PR
Sarra Mander/ Elke Panzner
Tel: +44 (0)20 7494 6570
Email: transversal@rainierpr.co.uk

About Transversal

Transversal is a Cambridge-based developer of intelligent eService software that enables organisations to achieve key sales, customer service and efficiency goals.

Transversal's flagship service, Metafaq, enables organisations to increase online sales and reduce the volume of call and e-mail queries to contact centres by automatically answering customers' questions online.

Transversal customers will typically see immediate and dramatic e-mail reductions, by around 60%, and improvements in e-mail response times, from days to minutes.

Intrafaq, Transversal's knowledge management solution for contact centres, delivers information to agents in a unique way from a dynamic natural language knowledgebase.

Simply by typing a question, in their own words, agents can access answers to customer questions; providing fast, accurate and consistent responses.

Organisations benefit from increased first call resolution and efficiency by improving the knowledge and quality of service provided by customer service and help-desk agents.

Transversal's Memory Engine™ is the result of research and development by top researchers in Information Theory and Machine Learning from Caltech and Cambridge universities.

Transversal co-founder, Prof. David MacKay, is a world renowned expert in Artificial Intelligence. He pioneered Bayesian Neural Networks in the late 1980s and remains at the forefront of the field.

Current customers include Sony, Direct Line, Thomsons, The AA, MFI, Barclays, Nissan, Fujifilm, Standard Life, Freemans, Grattans, Look Again, Kaleidoscope and the Metropolitan Police.

www.transversal.com