Customer Service Escalation Risk Analytics Using Data Mining and Machine Learning

University:
University of East Anglia
Subject:
Data Mining / Data Science
Module:
Data Mining
Level:
Masters / Postgraduate
Assignment Type:
MS Technical and scientific writing
Academic Year:
2025/26

Assignment Overview

This advanced Data Mining assessment applies the Knowledge Discovery in Databases (KDD) process to a realistic customer-service risk scenario. Acting as a Data Scientist, students analyse a historical Customer Service Escalation Risk dataset to help an organisation identify early indicators of dissatisfaction and operational bottlenecks that may lead to serious or legal customer escalations. The resulting analysis is intended to support strategic decisions relating to staffing, employee training, customer-journey improvement and escalation prevention. CMP-7023B_Assessement_2 (2) The dataset incorporates customer demographics, account characteristics, communication channels, issue categories, operational measures such as waiting times, transfers and SLA breaches, behavioural indicators including sentiment and response delays, and commercial variables such as monthly fees and contract value. The target variable, escalation_level, contains four categories: No escalation, Minor escalation, Serious escalation and Legal escalation. CMP-7023B_Assessement_2 (2) Students begin with data exploration and visualisation, producing appropriate descriptive statistics and identifying patterns, distributions and potential data-quality concerns. They then perform data cleansing, transformation, feature engineering and preprocessing. Variables that may introduce leakage or unreliable predictions because of their meaning, timing or quality must be critically assessed and justified. CMP-7023B_Assessement_2 (2) The supervised-learning stage requires students to develop, tune and compare predictive models using techniques such as k-nearest neighbours, Decision Trees, Support Vector Machines, ensemble methods or neural networks. Appropriate multiclass evaluation metrics must be used, alongside interpretation of influential variables and model behaviour. CMP-7023B_Assessement_2 (2) The assessment also includes unsupervised learning, requiring comparison of clustering methods such as K-Means and hierarchical clustering after removal of the target variable. Students may apply encoding, normalisation and dimensionality-reduction methods such as PCA or t-SNE and must interpret how the resulting clusters relate to escalation behaviour. CMP-7023B_Assessement_2 (2) Overall, the project assesses independent analytical judgement, modelling justification, comparative evaluation and clear communication of actionable findings for both technical and executive audiences. CMP-7023B_Assessement_2 (2) Overview word count: approximately 340 words. AI-use note: AI tools may only assist with small, specific code snippets. Any AI-generated code must be clearly acknowledged and cited, while the analysis, coding decisions, interpretation and final evaluation must remain the student's own work. CMP-7023B_Assessement_2 (2)

Megaminds Experience

Megaminds has supported academic requirements in data mining / data science, data mining and related disciplines.