Improving customer support efficiency through decision support powered by machine learning

Abstract: More and more aspects of today’s healthcare are becoming integrated with medical technology and dependent on medical IT systems, which consequently puts stricter re-quirements on the companies delivering these solutions. As a result, companies delivering medical technology solutions need to spend a lot of resources maintaining high-quality, responsive customer support. In this report, possible ways of increasing customer support efficiency using machine learning and NLP is examined at Sectra, a medical technology company. This is done through a qualitative case study, where empirical data collection methods are used to elicit requirements and find ways of adding decision support. Next, a prototype is built featuring a ticket recommendation system powered by GPT-3 and based on 65 000 available support tickets, which is integrated with the customer supports workflow. Lastly, this is evaluated by having six end users test the prototype for five weeks, followed by a qualitative evaluation consisting of interviews, and a quantitative measurement of the user-perceivedusability of the proposed prototype. The results show some support that machine learning can be used to create decision support in a customer support context, as six out of six test users believed that their long-term efficiency could improve using the prototype in terms of reducing the average ticket resolution time. However, one out of the six test users expressed some skepticism towards the relevance of the recommendations generated by the system, indicating that improvements to the model must be made. The study also indicates that the use of state-of-the-art NLP models for semantic textual similarity can possibly outperform keyword searches.