Automatically Selecting Answer Templates to Respond to Customer Emails

Rahul Malik, L. Venkata Subramaniam, Saroj Kaushik

Contact center agents typically respond to email queries from customers by selecting predefined answer templates that relate to the questions present in the customer query. In this paper we present a technique to automatically select the answer templates corresponding to a customer query email. Given a set of query-response email pairs we find the associations between the actual questions and answers within them and use this information to map future questions to their answer templates. We evaluate the system on a small subset of the publicly available Pine-Info discussion list email archive and also on actual contact center data comprising customer queries, agent responses and templates.