Industry Funded PhD Scholarship on Delivering an Effective Online Customer Experience through Intelligent Conversational Service Agents

We are looking for an excellent candidate to start October 2018, to develop and build novel bots and agents that will transform and enhance how customers engage, experience and interact with organisations that provide products and services on the web.This projects will combine Human Computer Interaction and Machine Learning with Marketing and Customer Service to transform how people interact with the web.

The goal of intelligent conversational service agents or chatbots is to help users access information and services from large complex websites in an efficient, personalized and cost-effective manner. Such agents use natural language responses to deliver the relevant information, acting like a customer service representative, to help customers resolve their complex information needs. Each year businesses spend $1.3 Trillion dollars on over 250 billion customer service calls each year. This is because many customers find it difficult to navigate and discover the information that they need from a website and its search engine, as the site is saturated with information - and so customers feel overwhelmed and overloaded, resulting in increased traffic to call centres, a poor customer experience and potentially loss of business.

It is touted that the adoption of intelligent conversational service agents can massively reduce customer service costs, speed up response times & operate 24/7. These intelligent conversational service agents are expected to be an increasingly important part of customer experience management. Initially, such agents will help customers in completing micro- tasks, perform triage, and automatically reply before being developed to assume more complex customer service tasks. What is clear is that this technology will be particular disruptive in the field of customer experience management as it will reduce the need for large scale manned call centres. Research suggests there is growing desire amongst the public with over 56% preferring to use chat rather than phone/voice (Nielsen Research, 2017). While chatbots have been around since the release of ELIZA in 1966, vast amounts of data and enhanced artificial intelligence capabilities have pushed the technology into the mainstream commercial space in the last few years, creating a hybrid experience between human customer service agents and the automated bots. In realizing this vision, there are many challenges: improving the natural language processing capabilities of such agents; enhancing the ability of the agents to learn from their environment in a shorter period of time; developing personalization of service on a large scale; managing the expectations and perceptions of customers. To realize the benefits, it is important to design and develop agents that are sensitive to the business context and business needs. However, beyond the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of the customer service agents, there is also the need to design agents that build trust and a relationship with the consumer. This will involve dialogue management where conversation and the provision of customer solutions are the object of design as opposed to website operation and graphical user interfaces.

This PhD project will explore these different issues depending on the experience and background of the candidate where the focus could be on: (a) developing new recommender algorithms that balance goal directed conversation with exploratory options – and how these algorithms can be generalized to different contexts, (b) exploring how to manage and track the state of conversation and how the agent should act/react, (c) measuring how satisfied the customer is with the experience and how this differ from interacting with actual agents/humans, etc.

This project will involve the combination of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Machine Learning (ML) to develop and build agents that can provide automated customer service in an effective manner.


The project will be supervised by Dr. Leif Azzopardi, who is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences. He leads the Interactive Information Retrieval research. The project will be jointly supervised by Prof. Alan Wilson from the Department of Marketing, which is part of the Business School. The candidate will join our team within the Strathclyde iSchool, in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences, and work with the Interactive Information Retrieval Team who undertake research on developing and understanding intelligent agents in a variety of contexts i.e. customer service agents, conversational search agents, intelligent search agents, etc.