COTA: Improving the Speed and Accuracy of Customer Support through Ranking and Deep Networks

For a company looking to provide delightful user experiences, it is of paramount importance to take care of any customer issues. This paper proposes COTA, a system to improve speed and reliability of customer support for end users through automated ticket classification and answers selection for support representatives. Two machine learning and natural language processing techniques are demonstrated: one relying on feature engineering (COTA v1) and the other exploiting raw signals through deep learning architectures (COTA v2). COTA v1 employs a new approach that converts the multi-classification task into a ranking problem, demonstrating significantly better performance in the case of thousands of classes. For COTA v2, we propose an Encoder-Combiner-Decoder, a novel deep learning architecture that allows for heterogeneous input and output feature types and injection of prior knowledge through network architecture choices. This paper compares these models and their variants on the task of ticket classification and answer selection, showing model COTA v2 outperforms COTA v1, and analyzes their inner workings and shortcomings. Finally, an A/B test is conducted in a production setting validating the real-world impact of COTA in reducing issue resolution time by 10 percent without reducing customer satisfaction

Using webcrawling of publicly available websites to assess E-commerce relationships

We investigate e-commerce success factors concerning their impact on the success of commerce transactions between businesses companies. In scientific literature, many e-commerce success factors are introduced. Most of them are focused on companies' website quality. They are evaluated concerning companies' success in the business-to- consumer (B2C) environment where consumers choose their preferred e-commerce websites based on these success factors e.g. website content quality, website interaction, and website customization. In contrast to previous work, this research focuses on the usage of existing e-commerce success factors for predicting successfulness of business-to-business (B2B) ecommerce. The introduced methodology is based on the identification of semantic textual patterns representing success factors from the websites of B2B companies. The successfulness of the identified success factors in B2B ecommerce is evaluated by regression modeling. As a result, it is shown that some B2C e-commerce success factors also enable the predicting of B2B e-commerce success while others do not. This contributes to the existing literature concerning ecommerce success factors. Further, these findings are valuable for B2B e-commerce websites creation

Predicting customer's gender and age depending on mobile phone data

In the age of data driven solution, the customer demographic attributes, such as gender and age, play a core role that may enable companies to enhance the offers of their services and target the right customer in the right time and place. In the marketing campaign, the companies want to target the real user of the GSM (global system for mobile communications), not the line owner. Where sometimes they may not be the same. This work proposes a method that predicts users' gender and age based on their behavior, services and contract information. We used call detail records (CDRs), customer relationship management (CRM) and billing information as a data source to analyze telecom customer behavior, and applied different types of machine learning algorithms to provide marketing campaigns with more accurate information about customer demographic attributes. This model is built using reliable data set of 18,000 users provided by SyriaTel Telecom Company, for training and testing. The model applied by using big data technology and achieved 85.6% accuracy in terms of user gender prediction and 65.5% of user age prediction. The main contribution of this work is the improvement in the accuracy in terms of user gender prediction and user age prediction based on mobile phone data and end-to-end solution that approaches customer data from multiple aspects in the telecom domain

Predicting Multi-class Customer Profiles Based on Transactions: a Case Study in Food Sales

Predicting the class of a customer profile is a key task in marketing, which enables businesses to approach the right customer with the right product at the right time through the right channel to satisfy the customer's evolving needs. However, due to costs, privacy and/or data protection, only the business' owned transactional data is typically available for constructing customer profiles. Predicting the class of customer profiles based on such data is challenging, as the data tends to be very large, heavily sparse and highly skewed. We present a new approach that is designed to efficiently and accurately handle the multi-class classification of customer profiles built using sparse and skewed transactional data. Our approach first bins the customer profiles on the basis of the number of items transacted. The discovered bins are then partitioned and prototypes within each of the discovered bins selected to build the multi-class classifier models. The results obtained from using four multi-class classifiers on real-world transactional data from the food sales domain consistently show the critical numbers of items at which the predictive performance of customer profiles can be substantially improved

Consumer finance: challenges for operational research

Consumer finance has become one of the most important areas of banking, both because of the amount of money being lent and the impact of such credit on global economy and the realisation that the credit crunch of 2008 was partly due to incorrect modelling of the risks in such lending. This paper reviews the development of credit scoring—the way of assessing risk in consumer finance—and what is meant by a credit score. It then outlines 10 challenges for Operational Research to support modelling in consumer finance. Some of these involve developing more robust risk assessment systems, whereas others are to expand the use of such modelling to deal with the current objectives of lenders and the new decisions they have to make in consumer finance. <br/

Operations research in consumer finance: challenges for operational research

Consumer finance has become one of the most important areas of banking both because of the amount of money being lent and the impact of such credit on the global economy and the realisation that the credit crunch of 2008 was partly due to incorrect modelling of the risks in such lending. This paper reviews the development of credit scoring,-the way of assessing risk in consumer finance- and what is meant by a credit score. It then outlines ten challenges for Operational Research to support modelling in consumer finance. Some of these are to developing more robust risk assessment systems while others are to expand the use of such modelling to deal with the current objectives of lenders and the new decisions they have to make in consumer financ

RESEARCH ISSUES CONCERNING ALGORITHMS USED FOR OPTIMIZING THE DATA MINING PROCESS

In this paper, we depict some of the most widely used data mining algorithms that have an overwhelming utility and influence in the research community. A data mining algorithm can be regarded as a tool that creates a data mining model. After analyzing a set of data, an algorithm searches for specific trends and patterns, then defines the parameters of the mining model based on the results of this analysis. The above defined parameters play a significant role in identifying and extracting actionable patterns and detailed statistics. The most important algorithms within this research refer to topics like clustering, classification, association analysis, statistical learning, link mining. In the following, after a brief description of each algorithm, we analyze its application potential and research issues concerning the optimization of the data mining process. After the presentation of the data mining algorithms, we will depict the most important data mining algorithms included in Microsoft and Oracle software products, useful suggestions and criteria in choosing the most recommended algorithm for solving a mentioned task, advantages offered by these software products.data mining optimization, data mining algorithms, software solutions