article

Advanced search system for IT support services

Authors:

K. El Maghraoui,

S. G. Tamilselvam,

R. D. Sharnagat,

T. H. Alexander,

Z. M. Valli-Hasham,

K. WahlmeierAuthors Info & Claims

IBM Journal of Research and Development, Volume 61, Issue 1

Pages 3:27 - 3:40

https://doi.org/10.1147/JRD.2016.2628658

Published: 01 January 2017 Publication History

Abstract

IBM's Technical Support Services division runs remote support centers, where agents provide phone support for client problems related to IBM and non-IBM hardware and software products. Support center personnel use numerous pieces of information-- including many searches, log files, and records of historical support tickets, from disparate data sources--to recommend solutions for customer technical problems. We have built an advanced search system to assist support agents who are resolving customer service requests and improving our client experience. The system has been deployed and used globally by thousands of support center personnel. In this paper, we describe the system's architecture, the technical challenges, and the innovative solution we have built. In addition, we discuss the novel ideas to address the unique requirements and challenges of the support services domain. These ideas include using system logs and domain knowledge to automatically expand agent queries, incorporating implicit agent feedback, and selecting features to extract useful information from highly unstructured and noisy ticket data. Results on the effectiveness of the system are presented. We also discuss future work on enhancing the system's capability to automatically diagnose customer hardware and software problems and remediate them.

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Cited By

Han JGoh KSun AAkbari MCuzzocrea AAllan JPaton NSrivastava DAgrawal RBroder AZaki MCandan SLabrinidis ASchuster AWang H(2018)Towards Effective Extraction and Linking of Software Mentions from User-Generated Support TicketsProceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3269206.3272026(2263-2271)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3269206.3272026
Mohapatra PDeng YGupta ADasgupta GParadkar AMahindru RRosu DTao SAggarwal P(2018)Domain Knowledge Driven Key Term Extraction for IT ServicesService-Oriented Computing10.1007/978-3-030-03596-9_35(489-504)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-03596-9_35

Advanced search system for IT support services
1. Information systems

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Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image IBM Journal of Research and Development

IBM Journal of Research and Development Volume 61, Issue 1

January/February 2017

132 pages

ISSN:0018-8646

Editors:
Alan Bivens
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center
,
Hari Ramasamy
IBM T. J. Watson Research Center

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Publisher

IBM Corp.

United States

Publication History

Published: 01 January 2017

Received: 01 April 2016

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Cited By

Han JGoh KSun AAkbari MCuzzocrea AAllan JPaton NSrivastava DAgrawal RBroder AZaki MCandan SLabrinidis ASchuster AWang H(2018)Towards Effective Extraction and Linking of Software Mentions from User-Generated Support TicketsProceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management10.1145/3269206.3272026(2263-2271)Online publication date: 17-Oct-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3269206.3272026
Mohapatra PDeng YGupta ADasgupta GParadkar AMahindru RRosu DTao SAggarwal P(2018)Domain Knowledge Driven Key Term Extraction for IT ServicesService-Oriented Computing10.1007/978-3-030-03596-9_35(489-504)Online publication date: 12-Nov-2018
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/978-3-030-03596-9_35

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