The synopsis of this presentation is about how ML can be employed to develop a bot that has the capability to understand natural language and provide suitable response.

1. Frankbot - ML framework for auto-responding
to customer support queries

2. Introduction to Freshdesk

3. Introduction to Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a multi-channel cloud based customer support product, which enables businesses to
● Streamline all customer conversations in one place - these are conversations between the business
and its end customers
● Automate repetitive work and make support agents more efficient
● Enable support agents to collaborate with other teams to resolve issues faster
● Freshdesk tickets are a record of customer conversations across channels (read phone, chat, e-
mail, social, etc.)
○ A typical conversation includes customer queries and agent responses
○ Frequently recurring customer queries are called L1 tickets
● Freshdesk currently has ~150,000 customers from across the world

4. Motivation & Objectives

5. Exponential ticket Inflow
32,000
88,000
1,86,000
201820162014 2019
projection
2,41,000
09
Agents
50
Agents
85
Agents
201820162014
130
Agents
2019
Bringing reinforcements
Q42019
Need for Automation
Data sourced from Freshdesk’s Support portal

6. Analyzed ticket complexity
Ticket Type Analysis
Data sourced from Freshdesk’s Support portal

7. - Deflect L1 tickets
- Free up agent time
Automate Level 1 Support
Objectives

8. Ask Freddy
Frankbot in production

9. Data and Methodology

10. Data sources for Model Training
● Source - Freshdesk data pertaining to customer (business) accounts
○ Knowledge base articles, FAQs
○ Tickets from different channels such as e-mail, portal (raised on website), chat,
social and phone
● Data of different accounts - All active and paid accounts with at least 100 tickets in the
last 3 months and 1 article in the knowledge base
● Training strategy
○ One model per account trained end-end
○ Embeddings trained at industry level, models at account level
Note: Tickets from email, portal-direct, chat and phone channels account for close to 95% of
the ticket volume

11. 201720162015
0.00%
20.00%
40.00%
Email
Chat
Portal
Feedback Widget
Phone
Social
Ticket Source
2018
Distribution of ticket volume by source
Data sourced from Freshdesk’s Support portal

12. Modelling Pipeline
L1 Embedding Layer
❖ Vectorization of preprocessed
text using two different
schemes
➢ LSA - Latent Semantic
analysis
➢ FastText
❖ LSA vector space is learnt for
each account in isolation
❖ FastText vectors are trained
at industry level
Data
❖ Historical Freshdesk
tickets and
Knowledge base
articles
Preprocessing
❖ Stopwords removal,
stemming/lemmatization, TF-IDF
based Bigram selection
❖ Removal of signatures and
footers, code constructs, non-
ascii characters, salutations,
disclaimers, etc.
*KB - Knowledge Base

13. Modelling Pipeline
L2 Layer
❖ Classification model (XGBoost) to act as a
gating function for L1 responses
❖ Model is trained using manually tagged
data and real-time customer feedback
❖ Features - % word match between
nouns/verbs/adjectives of words in the
query and responses, word mover
distance, ordered bigram & trigram counts
Response Retrieval
❖ Given a customer query, generate two L1
vectors, using LSA and FastText
representations
❖ Rank eligible solution articles based on
cosine similarity in the L1 space - top 3
responses are chosen
❖ L2 model is used for gating the
responses

14. L1 and L2 Gating Logic
The chosen response(s) is served iff at
least one of the following conditions are
satisfied.
❖ L1 score > L1_Upper
❖ L2 score > L2_Upper
❖ (L1 score > L1_Lower) & (L2 score
> L2_Lower)
Where, the upper and lower thresholds
are fine-tuned for each account based on
observed deflection performance.

15. Additional features of the bot

16. Teach the bot

17. Teach the bot
● Teach the bot is a feature that allows customer support agents to explicitly train the bot by
ingesting Q → A mappings
● When the Answer bot fails to respond to a query (Q), the agent can point the bot to the expected
response (A) which should have been returned
● If a suitable response (A) does not exist in the Knowledge base, it can be created on-the-fly
● This expected response (A) is consumed and mapped to be close to the query vector (Q) in the
L1 vector space
○ This ensures that article A would show up for future queries that are similar to Q
○ The same feature is re-purposed to resolve incorrect bot responses as well
○ This feature also helps to improve the overall coverage levels of the Answer bot

18. ● Model refresh is key to ensuring that the models are up to date and stay relevant
over time
● This is done once a week; or as soon as an account accumulates a sizeable
number of new queries or Knowledge base updates
● It involves the following steps
○ Retraining the LSA model after including the newly accumulated data
○ Incremental training of FastText vectors with new data
● Retraining the L2 model on recent data
○ The L2 model is updated using recent feedback provided by customers
Periodic model refresh

19. Results

20. Metrics and business impact
❖ # Active clients - number of customers who are exposing the bot to their customers in their
support portal
❖ % Deflection - Ratio of the # helpful bot responses (Helpful) and # Requests

21. Metrics and business impact
❖ # Requests - number of requests that the bot gets
❖ # Responded - number of requests responded/answered by the bot
❖ # Helpful - number of requests where the bot responses were helpful
❖ # No Feedback - number of bot responses for which there was no feedback from users
*CSAT - Customer Satisfaction Score
● CSAT* - 79% with bots and
72% without bots
● Average First Response Time
(overall) - 13 hrs with bots and
19 hrs without bots

22. ● Query could relate to a new topic for which there may not be enough FAQs or articles
● Query could relate to an existing topic but may contain keywords which are not in the
vocabulary - This may result in low L1 and L2 confidence which may not satisfy the thresholds
● Query may be related to a particular action - Example: “Can you connect me to an agent?”
which is a question for a task completion bot that has intent detection capabilities
● Query may not have a question or issue - Example: “I have an open ticket 3335924”
● Query may be ambiguous or unclear - Example: “discussion”
Why are some suggestions not helpful and some
queries not answered

23. Challenges and learnings
Challenges:
● Developing a preprocessing mechanism that can extract only the salient components from
messy emails
● Handling the complexity of storing and retrieving vector of floats (idfs, SVD components,
word vectors) for every account
● Serving predictions at low latency
● Usage of the right tools for monitoring and finding bugs in the codebase in a proactive
manner
Lessons Learnt:
● Focus on content creation and nurturing the AI
● Define success metrics and inform stakeholders about what a reasonable target is
● Define strategies for model refresh and feedback consumption

24. Thank You