Explain the emerging significance of intelligent agents in
facilitating effective customer service. Identify one or more examples
of e-commerce firms which have effectively exploited the unfolding
development of intelligent agents.

Hi! Thanks for the question.

E-commerce intelligent agents are significant in the area of customer
service since they facilitate the following:

- experience of personalization 
- ease of product selection, 
- and information dissemination. 

These benefits can be seen from the functions played by e-commerce
intelligence agents. I will also try to supply them with the examples.

 - “Informational agents” collect data triggered by the user’s
request. These informational agents can be further classified based on
their purpose. Some agents act upon the one-time queries of users,
some collect data periodically and others on information monitoring
requests.”

Ex: My Yahoo
http://my.yahoo.com/?myHome 

- “Action performing agents” are the agents that perform actual
selling or buying of products. These agent’s actions are based on the
result from other agents and some predefined conditions. These
action-performing agents are often “Multi-source” information agents.”

Ex: Stock Bots
http://www.botspot.com/search/s-stock.htm 

- “’Interfacing agents’ are agents that interface with the user and
involves running a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for getting input
from user and also presenting the data for the user.”

Ex: Amazon.com (They get inputs to what products you have queried
before and the next time you visit they will have product sets offered
to you which was related to your past searches.)
http://www.amazon.com 

- “It is difficult for a buyer to go to each supplier and get quotes
for the products.  Comparison-shopping for the same product from
different vendors would be cumbersome and time consuming. Intelligent
agents acting as a buyer agent would get the quotes from different
suppliers and present it to the buyer in the order of the prices and
services.”

Examples:
Priceline
http://www.priceline.com

Best Book Buys
http://www.bestwebbuys.com/books/ 

Article Sources:
 
“Introduction”
http://uisacad.uis.edu/~hvard01s/termpaper.htm 

“Intelligent Agents in E-commerce” (This is more deeper discussion of
the points discussed above)
http://ai.ijs.si/Sandi/publications/IAinEC.pdf 

Search terms used:         
“intelligence agents” e-commerce
“e-commerce agents”
                    
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Easterangel-ga                     
Google Answers Researcher

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