Modelling user Behaviour in online Q&A communities for customer support

Research output: Chapter in Book or Conference Publication/ProceedingConference Publicationpeer-review

3 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

With the increased popularity of Questions and Answers (Q&A) platforms, especially as a means to efficient customer support management, a lot of research has been carried out in order to study the user behaviour on Q&A sites. However, many research questions remain unanswered, as the underlying dynamics of replying in online communication platforms are not yet fully understood. One reason for this is that the interaction patterns in typical datasets with thousands of users and millions of posts are too complex to be broken down to the level of the individual users. In this paper, we present an agent-based model of online Q&A communities that is able to explain how these complex behaviour patterns evolve from the basic interactions of the individual agents. We evaluate our model on the SAP Community Network, and find that it closely reproduces Q&A behaviour of the real data.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationE-Commerce and Web Technologies - 15th International Conference, EC-Web 2014, Proceedings
EditorsMartin Hepp, Yigal Hoffner
PublisherSpringer-Verlag
Pages179-191
Number of pages13
ISBN (Electronic)9783319104904
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2014
Event15th International Conference on E-Commerce and Web Technologies, EC-Web 2014 - Munich, Germany
Duration: 1 Sep 20144 Sep 2014

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Business Information Processing
Volume188
ISSN (Print)1865-1348
ISSN (Electronic)1865-1356

Conference

Conference15th International Conference on E-Commerce and Web Technologies, EC-Web 2014
Country/TerritoryGermany
CityMunich
Period1/09/144/09/14

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