Answer-suggestion system for automatically resolving customer requests

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium storing instructions that when executed by a computer cause the computer to perform a method for suggesting helpful articles to automatically resolve a customer request, the method comprising:

• receiving the customer request, wherein the customer request is associated with a product or a service used by the customer;
• using a search engine to select a preliminary set of suggested articles from a set of possible articles based on correlations between words in the customer request and words in the set of possible articles;
• determining whether the customer request matches one or more similar previously received customer requests;
• if the customer request matches one or more previously received customer requests,
• identifying one or more helpful articles that were useful in resolving the one or more previously received customer requests;
• and
• modifying the preliminary set of suggested articles based on the one or more helpful articles to produce the set of suggested articles;
• if the customer request does not match any of the previously received customer requests, using the preliminary set of suggested articles as the set of suggested articles;
• and
• presenting the set of suggested articles to the customer to facilitate automatically resolving the customer request.

A system that suggests helpful articles to automatically resolve a customer request, comprising:

• at least one processor and at least one associated memory;
• and
• a request-processing mechanism that executes on the at least one processor, wherein during operation, the request-processing mechanism:
• receives the customer request, wherein the customer request is associated with a product or a service used by the customer;
• uses a search engine to select a preliminary set of suggested articles from a set of possible articles based on correlations between words in the customer request and words in the set of possible articles;
• determines whether the customer request matches one or more similar previously received customer requests;
• if the customer request matches one or more previously received customer requests,
• identifies one or more helpful articles that were useful in resolving the one or more previously received customer requests, and
• modifies the preliminary set of suggested articles based on the one or more helpful articles to produce the set of suggested articles;
• if the customer request does not match any of the previously received customer requests, uses the preliminary set of suggested articles as the set of suggested articles;
• and
• presents the set of suggested articles to the customer to facilitate automatically resolving the customer request.