AI-based Classification of Customer Support Tickets: State of the Art and Implementation with AutoML

One of today's primary priorities of companies is to improve the Customer Experience (CX) to increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn. However, "just 2 percent of organizations reached the top stage of CX maturity [and] most organizations are in early stages of CX maturity" (Dorsey et al., 2022). According to a recent study by Qualtrics (2022), 47 percent of customers ranked support as the second most important area of improvement in CX. One major factor of customer satisfaction identified in recent research (e.g., Service Excellence Research Group, 2021) is the speed at which customer support answers customer inquiries. Demand for customer support is rising and often exceeds the supply of available support agents. Especially missing knowledge and multiple re-routings between support agents are major factors for delays in resolution time. Further research suggests that due to information overload, the quality of decisions decreases with the number of decisions (Hemp, 2009; Viegas et al., 2015). In most recent studies, lack of time and resources are mentioned as the main issues in customer support, which harm the performance and, ultimately, the customer experience (HubSpot, 2022; Serrano et al., 2021).