Human Resource Allocation in an Online Customer Service Chat System with AI-based Chatbot

Abstract

Customer service plays an important role between organizations and its customers Among different types of customer service a unique feature of customer service chat (CSC) is that agents can serve multiple customers simultaneously The intelligent assistant (Chatbot) that emerged along with the development of artificial intelligence has become an auxiliary tool for the CSC system The organization imports the chatbot to the front interface of its CSC system for reducing the waiting time of customers and improving customer satisfaction And the introduction of chatbot also affects the human resource allocation of the CSC system inherent in the organization This study builds a CSC system that introduces a feedback-enabled chatbot through a simulation model and uses the simulation optimization tool to explore the human resource allocation strategy at different customer arrival rates It also compares the total cost as well as the percentage of abandonment before and after the import The results of the simulation experiments revealed that in the case of low customer arrival rate the introduction of the chatbot did not significantly reduce the average customer cost in the initial stage In the long term implementing chatbot brings significantly lower average total customer cost and the percentage of abandonment to the CSC system than the system without chatbots at three different arrival rates

Date of Award	2019
Original language	English
Supervisor	Chung-Chi Hsieh (Supervisor)