Abstract
With the rise of the popularity of e-commerce, it is evident that the service retail industries aim to reduce inventory and increase sales and profit margins. To achieve this, it is of paramount importance to establish excellent and effective interaction between customers and customer support. When a customer orders a product online, it is essential that the store demonstrates whether the products are in stock and the nearest stores to where the customers are. Currently, the needs of the customers are unlikely to be effectively met. Hence, the stores are unlikely to provide desirable products to customers even with high inventory. This paper investigates this issue at a typical and popular retail store in Vietnam. The authors present an investigation of this issue through two main stages. Corpus analysis for a set of collected text messages posted on the stores' websites for customer support was first carried out to explore the lexical patterns that indicate the customers' needs. This analysis revealed the frequency of customers' requests for the stores' locations where they can buy the goods and/or whether they are in stock. In the second stage of the investigation, the valuable findings from the corpus analysis were used for data extraction based on Named Entity Recognition (NER) software. The NER recognizes entities, including locations and names.
TopLiterature Review
Computer-mediated communication (CMC) is the communication medium individuals use to establish relational and social meaning, making use of technological advances. There are many styles used for communications online, such as emails, blogs, messaging apps, online conferencing, and emails. The term CMC refers to all these communications online or digital platforms used for human interactions (Altohalmi 2020; Sheblom 2020).
The question related to how CMC impacts different aspects of human life, either individual communications or organised group communications, for pleasure business or scholarly activities, has been explored by researchers (December, 1996). CMC was evidenced to facilitate effective learning experience in an environment where constructive alignment learning philosophy can be implemented. This is with particular reference to designing learning experiences for learners of second languages (Romiszowski & Mason 2004). CMC enables users to enhance their interactions and exchange of ideas and opinions with other people of similar interests and learning goals with similar interest in such conversations.
CMC tools can be synchronous or asynchronous. Synchronous CMC mode allows users to have real time interaction and discussions, such as real time meeting rooms, and video conferencing. This is similar to spoken interaction (Sykes 2005).
Asynchronous CMC does not happen in real-time. However, it is based on recorded or published information, which users access in their own time and not in real time. The time lag between receiving the CMC and contributing an answer allows the user to contemplate their answer. Users are also able to reread or re-watch the recorded communication anytime they wish (Altohami 2020, Newhagen 1996).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Text Message: Real-time text transmission over the Internet.
Customer Satisfaction: A term frequently used in marketing. It is a measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectation.
Named-Entity Recognition: A subtask of information extraction that seeks to locate and classify named entities mentioned in unstructed text into pre-defined categories such as person names, organizations, locations, time expressions, quantities, monetary values, percentages.