Development of an Automatic Customer Service System on Computer Networks

While the Internet is used by enterprises for contacting with customers, network-based customer services with e-mail or web-based interfaces have been developed to replace the traditional call centers with telephone interfaces. However, most existing network-based customer services heavily rely on manpower to reply e-mail or on-line requests submitted by customers, which not only increases the cost of providing customer services, but also delay the response time to complete the service procedure. To cope with these problems, this paper proposes an automatic customer service system, which can automatically handle customer requests by analyzing the contents of the requests and finding the most feasible answers from the Frequently-Asked Question (FAQ) database. If a customer is not satisfied with the reply, the system will forward the enquiry to the proper service personnel for further processing. An assistance model is also developed to help the service personnel to find suitable answers from the FAQ database and save new answer to it. Experimental results on practical applications showed that over 87.3% of users were satisfied with the replies given by the system; therefore, we conclude that the system can significantly reduce the service cost and provide more efficient and effective customer service. Keyword: Customer relationship management, Customer service system, Document matching, Call center, Internet applications