Development of an automatic customer service system on the internet

Most existing network-based customer services heavily rely on manpower in replying e-mails or on-line requests from customers, which not only increases the service cost, but also delay the time for responding the service requests. To cope with these problems, this paper proposes a 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. In the situation that a customer is not satisfied with the reply, the system will forward the request to the appropriate service personnel for further processing. An assistance mechanism has been developed to help the service personnel in finding potential answers from existing FAQ data or creating more appropriate answers. 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.