Lessons from Real-World Reinforcement Learning in a Customer Support Bot

In this work, we describe practical lessons we have learned from successfully using reinforcement learning (RL) to improve key business metrics of the Microsoft Virtual Agent for customer support. While our current RL use cases focus on components that rely on techniques from natural language processing, ranking, and recommendation systems, we believe many of our findings are generally applicable. Through this article, we highlight certain issues that RL practitioners may encounter in similar types of applications as well as offer practical solutions to these challenges.