Discovering patterns and trends in customer service technologies patents using large language model.

Area of Science:

• Service Science
• Information Systems
• Technology Management

Background:

• The service industry's definition evolved from material value to customer-centric value, accelerated by digital transformation.
• The Fourth Industrial Revolution and COVID-19 pandemic necessitated digital integration in service companies.
• Analysis of international patents from 2000-2022 reveals key trends in customer service and digital transformation.

Purpose of the Study:

• To analyze patent trends in the customer service industry concerning digital transformation.
• To identify and track the evolution of major topics within the service industry over time.
• To evaluate the utility of Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) for predicting technological trends.

Main Methods:

• Utilized Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformer (BERT) for natural language processing of patent data.
• Analyzed 3029 international patents related to customer service and digital transformation (2000-2022).
• Employed topic modeling (BERTopic) to identify 10 major themes and their yearly frequency trends.

Main Results:

• User-centric network service design emerged as the highest frequency trend by 2022.
• Cloud computing demonstrated the steepest growth in patent filings over the last five years.
• Steady development of user-centric network services observed since the internet's inception.

Conclusions:

• Cloud computing is a key technology for intensive development in 2023 for service industry digital transformation.
• BERTopic is an effective method for identifying time series trends in industry patents.
• The study suggests BERTopic's potential for predicting future technological advancements in customer service.