P54/79273/2015

LANYO Kelvin Odhiambo

Automated Customer Service and Customer Knowledge
Management - Utilizing Extractive Text Summarization
Techniques
A Case of Automated Customer Question Answering through Social Media

Supervisor: Dr. Agnes Wausi

Typically customer service majorly involves a one way kind of communication where theorganization usually controls the point of interaction
either through a call center, helpdesk emailaddress, or even a postal address. This means that the “customer service experience” facesseveral
limitations: response time (time it takes a customer to get a response about an inquirythey have made) and response rate (rate at which customer
inquiries are retrieved and attendedto). The typical customer service initiatives rely heavily on human agents being stationed on theother end of
the communication channel. In a human resource perspective this is a full time job,an 8 – 5 as some will say. From this view we can see that the
customer interaction is limited tothe set official working hours timings for the day and also the week. The volume of the customer
inquiries will also affect response time and response rate, where filtering through the bulk of thecustomer inquiries in the multiple customer
service channels an organization has implemented,will take time and huge effort. So the organization has to decide to increase man-power,
manhoursor both.Organizations utilize customer knowledge management (CKM) as a strategic initiative toacquire critical actionable information
from their customers related to their businessservices/products. Organizations use this knowledge to implement organizational and
behavioralchanges to respond effectively to customer needs or the competition. In a traditional setting thiswill require the customer service
department to read each and every customer inquiry, or more
conveniently select a sample of the customer inquiries, for them to get a feeling of what exactlythe customers are what. For a modern
organization that has embraced electronic customerinteraction platforms as a channel for customer relations management (CRM), analyzing
thecustomer inquiries will not only prove cumbersome and error prone, but also costly.The study focused on utilizing extractive text
summarization techniques to support thedevelopment of an automated agent to solve the response time and response rate challenges, toassist
organizations who have lean customer service staff better manage their customerinteractions and also to extract customer knowledge that can be
used to improve on servicesoffered to the customers. A comparative implementation of 2 text summarization approaches asdocumented by
(Jurafsky & Martin, 2014) was done. The first approach, a supervised approach,used a binary classifier and Term Frequency-Inverse Document
Frequency TF-IDF (Salton &McGill, 1983) to respond to customer queries. This was achieved by running a test string, made4
up of keywords extracted from the customer query using TF-IDF scores, against a Naïve Bayes(NB) classifier trained on frequently asked
questions (FAQs). The customer response was thenselected from the FAQs with the NB classifier matched with the keywords test string.The
second approach, an unsupervised approach, used a keywords extraction strategy executed by utilizing lexical graphs to identify keywords using
their co-occurrence scores. The identified keywords were then used in a query formulation algorithm and run against an FAQ database to get
candidate answers that were then passed on the customer as responses. The extracted keywords from the customer queries, the categorization of
customer queries and the eventual response selection procedures formed the foundation of the customer knowledge management solution. From
this information the organization was able to better understand what
the customers really need from their services. The study results showcased the feasibility of utilizing text summarization techniques in
implementing customer support and customer knowledge management initiatives. The study results highlighted the following critical system
needs/requirements for effective automated agent implementations: I. Tighter monitoring by human agents should be effected to check on the
quality and relevance of automated agent responses II. More detailed and granular FAQ databases should to be maintained to enable refined
customer responses by the automated agent III. Better database tuning/optimization techniques should to be enforced especially as the FAQ
database grows overtime. IV. Finally a follow-up mechanism needs to be instituted to check on the effectiveness/helpfulness of automated agent
customer response. The solution implemented by this study can be used by organizations intending to implement a robust, efficient and effective
electronic media enabled customer support mechanism. It can also be used to manage customer knowledge retrieved from customer posts in a
variety of electronic media platforms.
Key Word: Customer support, customer knowledge, text summarization, automated agent, question answering