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A VIRTUAL SECRETARY TO ANSWER E-MAILCHANCES ARE THAT YOUR favorite band, snack food, or car has its own Web site--complete with an E-mail address to which you can send questions and comments. If you're lucky, you will hear back in a day or two. But often it takes companies a week or even a month to reply, if they do at all, which sort of defeats the purpose of establishing an online link to consumers. Now, help is on the way for companies trying to cope with volumes of unanswered E-mail: BrightResponse, a software package from Brightware Inc. in Novato, Calif. Instead of humans reading messages and writing back, the software scans E-mail automatically and shoots back information in a flash. It keeps an eye out for certain key words--selected by each business--and then creates responses from a set of fill-in-the-blank templates. A query about a new outboard engine, for instance, could be answered with a personalized E-letter and an appropriate data sheet. The system is smart enough to hand off messages that require personal attention. The first customers are Amway Corp. and Swiss Bank Corp. Pricing hasn't been set yet, but low-volume customers will likely get charged a per-reply fee that's less than the cost of a postage stamp.
By John W. Verity
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Updated June 15, 1997 by bwwebmaster
Copyright 1997, by The McGraw-Hill Companies Inc. All rights reserved.
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