Biblio

Hiring seasonal workers in call centers to provide customer service is a common practice in B2C companies. The quality of service delivered by both contracting and employee customer service agents depends heavily on the domain knowledge available to them. When observing the internal group messaging channels used by agents, we found that similar questions are often asked repetitively by different agents, especially from less experienced ones. The goal of our work is to leverage the promising advances in conversational AI to provide a chatbot-like mechanism for assisting agents in promptly resolving a customer's issue. In this paper, we develop a neural-based conversational solution that employs BiLSTM with attention mechanism and demonstrate how our system boosts the effectiveness of customer support agents. In addition, we discuss the design principles and the necessary considerations for our system. We then demonstrate how our system, named "Isa" (Intuit Smart Agent), can help customer service agents provide a high-quality customer experience by reducing customer wait time and by applying the knowledge accumulated from customer interactions in future applications.

We consider a service system where agents (or, servers) are invited on-demand. Customers arrive as a Poisson process and join a customer queue. Customer service times are i.i.d. exponential. Agents' behavior is random in two respects. First, they can be invited into the system exogenously, and join the agent queue after a random time. Second, with some probability they rejoin the agent queue after a service completion, and otherwise leave the system. The objective is to design a real-time adaptive agent invitation scheme that keeps both customer and agent queues/waiting-times small. We study an adaptive scheme, which controls the number of pending agent invitations, based on queue-state feedback. We study the system process fluid limits, in the asymptotic regime where the customer arrival rate goes to infinity. We use the machinery of switched linear systems and common quadratic Lyapunov functions to derive sufficient conditions for the local stability of fluid limits at the desired equilibrium point (with zero queues). We conjecture that, for our model, local stability is in fact sufficient for global stability of fluid limits; the validity of this conjecture is supported by numerical and simulation experiments. When the local stability conditions do hold, simulations show good overall performance of the scheme.