Email classification for contact centers

  • Authors:
  • Ani Nenkova;Amit Bagga

  • Affiliations:
  • Columbia University, New York, NY;Avaya Labs Research, Basking Ridge, NJ

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Applied computing
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

The explosive growth of the Internet has made email an integral part of business communication. Therefore, business customer service centers, or contact centers, are processing larger amounts of email interactions with customers. In this paper we discuss a preliminary email routing and classification system that filters and classifies incoming email messages upon their content. A module first attempts to identify and filter those email messages that do not require immediate (if any) responses. We call such email messages single messages. The emails that do require immediate responses are called root messages. A second module classifies messages in categories that characterize the type of interaction between the contact center operators and the customers. Emails that are involved in such interactions form a thread and can be classified broadly into one of three categories: root, inner, and leaf. Root messages are those that start a thread while a leaf message is the final email sent in an interaction. All other emails in the interaction are considered to be inner messages.