Ontology-based reasoning for the intelligent handling of customer complaints

•This research analyzes and builds the customer complaint and handling ontology.•This research presents the case-based reasoning for intelligent customer complaint handling i-CCH.•This research develops an i-CCH system based on the new case-retrieval mechanism.•The solution offers enterprises an interoperable knowledge-based approach to handle complaints.

While responding to customer complaints and solving customer problems effectively contributes to high service quality, a customer complaint can also be regarded as a critical source of information for improving the firms’ products and services. Handling complaints successfully can resolve crises and help maintain customer loyalty. Hence, from a customer relationship management (CRM) perspective, it is well worth collecting and analyzing complaint-related knowledge. Constructing ontology of customer complaints is the first crucial step in CRM. Web Ontology Language (OWL) is a formal tool for defining an ontology, providing a complete description of the domain knowledge. The ontological schema of complaint handling serves as the basis for case-based reasoning (CBR) mechanism which includes retrieving cases, using case indexing and similarity matrixes procedures. Thus, this research presents an interoperable ontology and case-based reasoning for intelligent complaint handling. The solution offers enterprises an informative and knowledge-based methodology to resolve customer complaints systematically with self-learning feature.