Transversal's new Sales Engine allows targeted marketing through advanced neural technology and Barclays bank are the first to cash in on the development.

With £8.2 billion spent on the web in 2005 in the UK alone (Source Verdict), customers are becoming increasingly demanding when choosing goods and services online.

In response, Transversal, a Cambridge-based developer of intelligent eService software, has launched Sales Engine, the first online marketing solution able to serve up targeted content, advertising and sales promotions in response to naturally phrased questions asked by customers via an organisation's website.

And Barclays bank is the first customer to benefit with Transversal's Sales Engine implemented across its main www.barclays.co.uk site.

Consumers using the '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 marketing 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.

Built on advanced neural network technology, the Transversal Sales Engine enables marketing functions to quickly and easily exploit website real-estate for product launches and sales promotions. Without altering the existing website structure, it integrates seamlessly to transform a static website into a proactive customer-centric sales tool, the company says.

"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," explains Barnaby Davis, electronic banking director at Barclaysr. "Sales Engine delivers invaluable information on what our customers are interested in, where it matters most - at the point of purchase."

As well as providing full statistics such as advert views, click-throughs and conversions, the Transversal Sales Engine provides invaluable customer insight by providing an audit trail of the questions customers ask in the crucial process of making buying decisions.

Davin Yap, Transversal CEO, says: "The Internet promised that the customer would be king. Sadly, most websites simply fail to deliver the one-to-one experience that consumers demand, forcing them to more expensive offline channels or to 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 marketing information that meets their needs. Implementing the Sales Engine will help organisations accelerate the growth of online sales of products and services."

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 in a straightforward, intuitive manner.

Transversal's Memory Engine(tm) 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.

"Advertisements can be in the style of graphic banners and Google style text links designed to create calls to action and reduce transaction abandonment. Additionally, the Sales Engine provides site owners with 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.

"Built on a dynamic, self-organising knowledgebase the Sales Engine is easy to update and managed by the marketing department 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," explains Yap.