Searching for answers naturally

The Provincial Agency for Health Services (Azienda Provinciale per i Servizi Sanitari) in Trento, Italy, has implemented COGITO Answers from Expert System to make its Web site more user-friendly and interactive.

Adriano Passerini, director of the agency’s customer relation service, explains, "The need to implement an information search service on the portal of the APSS came from observing the difficulties users experienced when connecting to the home page. The selected solution, with its ability to query in natural language, seems to be suiting our needs well. The searches are easier and produce accurate answers. Moreover, we can rely on the structuring of a permanent system to improve the search, based on a periodic evaluation of the questions posed to the system that don’t result in clear answers."

Emanuele Seu, the IT director who manages the information portal on the agency’s Web site, says, "The system has helped us better connect with users. With its automated semantic understanding, it makes interaction easy and stress-free—and guarantees the best quality of answers."

Expert System reports that one month after deploying its solution, the Provincial Agency for Health Services saw the following benefits:

• 80 percent increase in online queries sent through the search engine, proving the system is being used;
• 70 percent increase in time spent on Web pages sent by the solution, proving patients are finding the information provided by the system is valuable and worth reading; and
• 46 percent increase in user visits that start and end on the same page, proving patients are finding exactly what they need in one click.