Enhancing Customer Service in Financial Institutions Through Automated Complaint Classification: A Machine Learning Approach

Authors

  • Doreen Mutesi University of Lay Adventists of Kigali
  • Dr. Jonathan Ngugi University of Lay Adventists of Kigali
  • Dr. Sumbiri Djuma University of Lay Adventists of Kigali

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.70619/vol5iss8pp61-71

Keywords:

Natural Language Processing (NLP), Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF)

Abstract

This paper presents a method to automatically group financial consumer complaints by the type of product they are about, using Natural Language Processing (NLP). The dataset was cleaned and prepared by removing unnecessary words, breaking it into tokens, and converting it into numbers using TF-IDF. Then, Machine learning models are trained to predict which product each complaint is related to. Among the models tested, Stochastic Gradient Descent gave good results. The findings show that NLP can help financial institutions handle complaints faster and more accurately by sorting them automatically into product categories. This approach can be helpful for banks and regulators in improving how they respond to customer issues.

Author Biography

Doreen Mutesi, University of Lay Adventists of Kigali

Faculty of Computing and Information Sciences

References

Adebayo, S. M., & Nwakanma, C. I. (2020). A comparative study of text classification algorithms for financial data. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications,11(5),370–377.

Adelani, D., Ruiter, D., Alabi, J., & Others. (2023). MasakhaNEWS: News Topic Classification in African Languages. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.10412

Aggarwal, C. C., & Zhai, C. (2012). A survey of text classification algorithms. In C. C. Aggarwal & C. Zhai (Eds.), Mining text data (pp. 163–222)

Grunewald, E., Seitz, H., & Fuchs, L. (2019). Automatic classification of financial consumer complaints: A text mining approach. International Journal of Information Management, 47, 218–225.

Joachims, T. (1998). Text categorization with Support Vector Machines: Learning with many relevant features. In Machine Learning: ECML-98 (pp. 137–142)

Kowsari, K., Jafari Meimandi, K., Heidarysafa, M., Mendu, S., Barnes, L. E., & Brown, D. E. (2019). Text classification algorithms: A survey. Information, 10(4), 150. https://doi.org/10.3390/info10040150

Nguyen, T. T., Nguyen, N. D., & Nguyen, T. V. (2015). Random forest classifier combined with feature selection for financial text classification. Journal of Computer Science and Cybernetics, 31(4), 343–356.

Rennie, J. D., Shih, L., Teevan, J., & Karger, D. R. (2003). Tackling the poor assumptions of naive Bayes text classifiers. In ICML (Vol. 3, pp. 616–623)

Sandoval, L., Nunez, J. C., & Gomez-Adorno, H. (2020). Consumer complaint classification using TF-IDF and machine learning models. Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ICAI), 84–90.

Taylor, J., & Amoss, T. (2025). SMS Fraud Detection in Chichewa using Classical Machine Learning Models. African Journal of AI Research, 9(1), 45–52.

Zhang, Y., & Jin, R. (2010). Understanding the bag-of-words model: A statistical framework. International Journal of Machine Learning and Cybernetics, 1(1), 43–52. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13042-010-0001-0

Downloads

Published

2025-09-23

How to Cite

Mutesi, D. ., Ngugi, D. J. ., & Djuma, D. S. . (2025). Enhancing Customer Service in Financial Institutions Through Automated Complaint Classification: A Machine Learning Approach. Journal of Information and Technology, 5(8), 61–71. https://doi.org/10.70619/vol5iss8pp61-71

Issue

Section

Articles

Most read articles by the same author(s)