By Ben Rooney

From sister blog Tech Europe:

An artificial intelligence service that automatically resolves consumers disputes and can even engage in negotiations was displayed at Le Webin London on Wednesday.

Cognicor, a spinoff company from the Barcelona Institute of Artificial Intelligence, is aimed at businesses that get a huge volume of low-value complaints that need to be resolved.

Some companies receive tens, even hundreds of thousands of complaints a month, according to Cognicor Chief Executive Sindhu Joseph. At the moment, those complaints must be handled by hand, typically offshore, which is slow, expensive and unsatisfactory for both business and consumer.

A typical complaint might be someone has been on vacation and an airline company mislaid their bags for five days, Ms. Joseph said. The customer wants compensation for this.

Using Cognicor, complaints are submitted via a Web interface. The system checks the validity of the complaint the customer is who they say they are, they traveled on the flight they claim, etc. Having established the bona fides of the complainant, it then looks at a number of factors.

Sentiment analysis of the complaint can determine how severe the complaint is. It also looks for context, and it looks to see who is making the complaint and their social influence, Ms. Joseph said. If you take the example of the lost baggage, it makes a difference if you lose your bags going out on vacation, or coming back. That is what we mean by context.

By influence, Ms. Joseph means either the importance of the customer to the company, or their social influence. Measures for determining social influence are being deveoped but include Facebook and Twitter influence.

By using a corpus of existing complaints and resolutions provided by the company, the system can learn how to automate the process. For example, it could offer you cash back or a voucher to offset against another flight.

Here is the original post:

AI System Automates Consumer Gripes