scholarly journals MOLI: Smart Conversation Agent for Mobile Customer Service

Information ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guoguang Zhao ◽  
Jianyu Zhao ◽  
Yang Li ◽  
Christoph Alt ◽  
Robert Schwarzenberg ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Base ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Question Type ◽  
Dialogue System ◽  
Customer Support ◽  
Matching Networks ◽  
Broad Variety ◽  
Slot Filling ◽  
Answer Ranking ◽  
Sequential Matching

Human agents in technical customer support provide users with instructional answers to solve a task that would otherwise require a lot of time, money, energy, physical costs. Developing a dialogue system in this domain is challenging due to the broad variety of user questions. Moreover, user questions are noisy (for example, spelling mistakes), redundant and have various natural language expressions. In this work, we introduce a conversational system, MOLI (the name of our dialogue system), to solve customer questions by providing instructional answers from a knowledge base. Our approach combines models for question type and intent category classification with slot filling and a back-end knowledge base for filtering and ranking answers, and uses a dialog framework to actively query the user for missing information. For answer-ranking we find that sequential matching networks and neural multi-perspective sentence similarity networks clearly outperform baseline models, achieving a 43% error reduction. The end-to-end P@1(Precision at top 1) of MOLI was 0.69 and the customers’ satisfaction was 0.73.

Mitigating Burnout Through Organizational Justice: Customer Support Workers’ Experiences of Customer Injustice and Emotional Labor

2021 ◽  
pp. 089331892110120
Author(s):  
Heewon Kim ◽  
Rebecca B. Leach
Keyword(s):  
Procedural Justice ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Emotional Labor ◽  
Call Center ◽  
Service Industries ◽  
Interpersonal Justice ◽  
Negatively Associated ◽  
Customer Support ◽  
Decision Making Processes

Employee burnout is a critical organizational concern that can be prevalent among customer support workers whose day-to-day tasks inherently include emotional labor. This study examines emotional labor and burnout among call center workers in customer service industries, specifically focusing on the influences of injustices from customers and supervisors. The findings demonstrate that: (a) customer injustice was associated with an increase in emotional labor, which in turn exacerbated customer support workers’ disengagement and exhaustion; (b) interpersonal justice perceived in the interactions with supervisors was negatively associated with disengagement; and (c) procedural justice perceived in supervisors’ decision-making processes was also negatively associated with disengagement. The findings indicate the mitigating role of interpersonal and procedural justice in reducing burnout among customer support workers.

Repositioning the customer support services: the next frontier of competitive advantage

2020 ◽  
Vol 54 (7) ◽  
pp. 1787-1804 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jagdish Sheth ◽  
Varsha Jain ◽  
Anupama Ambika
Keyword(s):  
Competitive Advantage ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Support Services ◽  
Conceptual Approach ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Profit Center ◽  
Support Unit ◽  
Customer Support ◽  
Cost Center ◽  
New Framework

Purpose This paper aims to analyze the present status of customer support services (CSS) and advocate the re-positioning of support services from an administrative cost center to a strategic profit center. Authors demonstrate how customer support or after sales services can be a source of competitive advantage and revenue generation for firms. Design/methodology/approach The study adopts a conceptual approach grounded in theoretical foundations of service dominant logic, customer loyalty and customer centricity along with practical illustrations from the industry. Findings Following the tenets of theory, review of existing research and analysis of the industry practices, the authors propose a new framework to enable the repositioning of customer service function. The key propositions include establishing customer support as separate business unit and insights center, introducing a new role of a C-level chief customer support officer to lead the customer support unit, adopting a customer-centric culture and process, enabling frontline IT support and investing in frontline employee skills development. Research limitations/implications Academics should examine the potential of customer support, where the strategic importance is low at present, leading to customer dissatisfaction. The new approach and positioning of customer support calls for a new direction for research in this area focusing on enablers, challenges and further implications. To succeed in this competitive era, firms should be conscious of the value of customer service and undertake concrete actions to generate value for all stakeholders. Practical implications Industry can use the new framework and re-position CSS of the organizations. The CSS unit can be different from other business units in the organizations. The CSS would evolve and emerge from the live customer insights. CSS unit can be managed by the C level chief CSS officer. Customer-centric culture would be developed and front line processes can be made customer-oriented by the officer. Thus, this paper and framework would provide new customer-centric directions to the organizations for effective functioning. Originality/value This is the original piece that has emerged from the experience and expertise of the authors.

scholarly journals Taxonomy Extraction for Customer Service Knowledge Base Construction

2019 ◽  
pp. 175-190
Author(s):  
Bianca Pereira ◽  
Cecile Robin ◽  
Tobias Daudert ◽  
John P. McCrae ◽  
Pranab Mohanty ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Base ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Knowledge Base Construction

Knowledge-Driven Customer Support Services

2011 ◽  
pp. 23-38
Author(s):  
Itzhak Aviv ◽  
Meira Levy ◽  
Irit Hadar
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Support Services ◽  
Service Providers ◽  
Relationship Management ◽  
Customer Support ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
A Company ◽  
Software Organization

A Customers Relationship Management (CRM) program aspires to manage the relationship between a company and its customers as a key to success, in view of the fact that good relationships with customers lead to higher customers’ satisfaction. Despite the importance of CRM programs, their failure rates are high, partly because CRM service providers cannot resolve customers’ claims on time, which often occur due to the difficulty to find valuable knowledge and reproduce solutions. Therefore, integrating Knowledge Management (KM) activities, and in particular social Web 2.0 applications, within a CRM solution suit may enable to significantly enhance the efficiency of the organizational CRM program and build a knowledge-driven customer support services solution. The proposed CRM solution is based on a research case study conducted within customer service department of a large software organization.

scholarly journals Deep Cascade Multi-Task Learning for Slot Filling in Online Shopping Assistant

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 ◽  
pp. 6465-6472 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu Gong ◽  
Xusheng Luo ◽  
Yu Zhu ◽  
Wenwu Ou ◽  
Zhao Li ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Knowledge Base ◽  
Online Shopping ◽  
State Of The Art ◽  
Language Understanding ◽  
Dialog Systems ◽  
Named Entity ◽  
Online Test ◽  
Benchmark Datasets ◽  
Slot Filling

Slot filling is a critical task in natural language understanding (NLU) for dialog systems. State-of-the-art approaches treat it as a sequence labeling problem and adopt such models as BiLSTM-CRF. While these models work relatively well on standard benchmark datasets, they face challenges in the context of E-commerce where the slot labels are more informative and carry richer expressions. In this work, inspired by the unique structure of E-commerce knowledge base, we propose a novel multi-task model with cascade and residual connections, which jointly learns segment tagging, named entity tagging and slot filling. Experiments show the effectiveness of the proposed cascade and residual structures. Our model has a 14.6% advantage in F1 score over the strong baseline methods on a new Chinese E-commerce shopping assistant dataset, while achieving competitive accuracies on a standard dataset. Furthermore, online test deployed on such dominant E-commerce platform shows 130% improvement on accuracy of understanding user utterances. Our model has already gone into production in the E-commerce platform.

Information Technology Customer Service: ―Best Practices‖ Processes For Operations

2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Keith Wright ◽  
Charles J. Capps III
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Best Practice ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Lessons Learned ◽  
Information Economy ◽  
Customer Support ◽  
Formal Program ◽  
It Managers ◽  
Service Managers

In today’s information economy, information technology customer service managers require increasingly technologically advanced, but cost effective operations. These managers have a Byzantine array of standards, methodologies and best practice frameworks that offer hundreds of pages of detailed, but often confusing, guidance. This article attempts to offer a simpler guide for IT managers beginning a formal program to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of the day- to-day operation of their customer support services. The paper’s goal is to summarize and clarify important key concepts from the literature, and also present lessons learned from consulting experiences with several large organizations. Finally, the paper offers ideas for future empirical confirmation of the recommendations summarized here.

scholarly journals UNISEL Bot: Designing Simple Chatbot System for University FAQs

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 4689-4693
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
System Development ◽  
Data Gathering ◽  
Marketing Department ◽  
Customer Support ◽  
Interactive Mode ◽  
Interview Method ◽  
User Data ◽  
User Attention

The UNISEL Bot system was developed for helping marketing department in order to help on giving information in interactive mode for marketing purpose. The current problem is the information are not served in interactive ways, manually serving information using portal and paper are complicated and there is no real-time customer support to help on question and answer. In the era of technology, the information should be served in an interactive platform. The interactive information tends to gather more user attention. Therefore, this project aims to develop marketing assistant Chatbot system for a private academic institution which known as UNISEL Bot. The Chatbot system development is expected to assist the marketing department to use smarter marketing and interactive ways, for instance; to receive FAQs from student and provide real-time feedback whilst encourage people to engage with latest technology. Agile methodology was used in the development of this Chatbot system. Qualitative data gathering using interview method with students and University staffs was implemented. Multiple diagram is presented in this paper to describe the process flow of UNISEL Bot system. UNISEL Bot system was made up of seven main modules including the Ask Question, Feedback, Registration, Event, Appointment, Survey and Map. In future, this Chatbot system can work effectively to replace the traditional method of manual customer service and can also helping people in capturing user data for building analytic data.

The Challenge for Customer Service

2000 ◽  
pp. 57-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Guy Saward
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Customer Service ◽  
Financial Institution ◽  
Business Success ◽  
Business Practices ◽  
Distributed Information ◽  
Customer Support ◽  
Study Approach ◽  
New Business

It is a truism that customer service is the key to business success. It is particularly true given competition and new business practices lead customers to want products that are “free, perfect, now” (El Sawy et al., 1998). The trend in UK customer service, led by the U.S., is for service delivery via Call Centres to be deflected towards the Internet. Providing the knowledge to support this (O’Leary, 1998), along with relationship management (Duke et al., 1999) is a key application area for knowledge management (KM). However, the research into KM for effective customer service is minimal. What is clear is that publishing information on an intranet, extranet, or Internet does not constitute effective customer support. This chapter takes a case study approach to exploring knowledge management for customer service. The key problem we are working towards solving is how best to deploy knowledge via distributed information systems. The case study is derived from the author’s involvement in a project for a financial institution (referred to as AFI throughout). It describes a particular approach to managing knowledge that combines elements from information retrieval (IR) with KM. A key part of this is the evaluation of alternative interfaces that take different approaches to the presentation of search results.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document