Support Unit Classification through Supervised Machine Learning

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to evaluate the impact a supervised machine learning classification model can have on the process of internal customer support within a large digitized company. Chatbots are becoming a frequently used utility among digital services, though the true general impact is not always clear. The research is separated into the following two questions: (1) Which supervised machine learning algorithm of naïve Bayes, logistic regression, and neural networks can best predict the correct support a user needs and with what accuracy? And (2) What is the effect on the productivity and customer satisfaction of using machine learning to sort customer needs? The data was collected from the internal server database of a large digital company and was then trained on and tested with the three classification algorithms. Furthermore, a survey was collected with questions focused on understanding how the current system affects the involved employees. A first finding indicates that neural networks is the best suited model for the classification task. Though, when the scope and complexity was limited, naïve Bayes and logistic regression performed sufficiently. A second finding of the study is that the classification model potentially improves productivity given that the baseline is met. However, a difficulty exists in drawing conclusions on the exact effects on customer satisfaction since there are many aspects to take into account. Nevertheless, there is a good potential to achieve a positive net effect.