Enhancing Customer Service in Financial Institutions Through Automated Complaint Classification: A Machine Learning Approach
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.70619/vol5iss8pp61-71Keywords:
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.
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
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2025 Doreen Mutesi, Dr. Jonathan Ngugi, Dr. Sumbiri Djuma

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.