Detecting Non-routine Customer Support E-Mails

Customer support can affect customer churn both positively and negatively. By identify non-routine e-mails to be handled by senior customer support agents, the customer support experience can potentially be improved. Complex e-mails, i.e. non-routine, might require longer time to handle, being more suitable for senior staff. Non-routine e-mails can be considered anomalous. This paper investigates an approach for context-based unsupervised anomaly detection that can assign each e-mail an anomaly score. This is investigated in customer support setting with 43523 e-mails. Context-based anomalies are investigated over different time resolutions, by multiple algorithms. The likelihood of anomalous e-mails can be considered increased when identified by several algorithms or over multiple time resolutions. The approach is suitable to implement as a decision support system for customer support agents in detecting e-mails that should be handled by senior staff.