Lessons Learned using CBR for Customer Support

Three CBR systems were created to improve customer support at General Electric Appliances. The first tool helped call takers answer customers’ questions by using a case base of frequent questions and their answers. This has been in use since 1999 and increased the percentage of questions that could be answered without sending a field service technician to the customers’ home. The second tool is a web-based version of the first tool that is designed for customer selfservice. This has been in use since early 2000. The third tool is an email handling system that helps customer service answer email questions by storing previous email with their answers. This has been in use since late 2000 and reduced the average time to answer an email message by 40%. This paper focuses on business aspects of the systems described.