Abstract
Due to the rapid growth of Internet, means of communication with customers in a traditional customer support environment such as telephone calls are being replaced by mainly e-mail in a Web-based customer support system. Although such a Web-based support is efficient and promises potential benefits for firms, including reduced transaction costs, reduced time, and high quality of support, there are some difficulties associated with responding to many types of customer's inbound e-mails appropriately. As many types of e-mail are received, considerable attention is being paid to methods for increasing the efficiency of managing and responding e-mails. This research proposes an intelligent system for managing customer's inbound e-mails in organizations by applying case based reasoning technique for responding to various customers' inbound e-mails more effectively. In this approach, a case is represented as a frame-typed data structure corresponding to an inbound e-mail, keywords, and its reply e-mail. In the retrieval procedure, keywords and affinity set is developed to index a case, and then the case is represented as a vector, a case vector. Also, cosines value is calculated to measure the similarity between a new inbound e-mail and the cases in the case base. In the adaptation procedure, we provide several adaptation strategies to adapt and modify the retrieved case. The strategies guide to make an outbound e-mail using product databases, databases for customer support, etc. Additionally, the Web-based system architecture is proposed to implement our methodology. The proposed methodology and system will be helpful for developing more efficient Web-based customer support.
