Predicting Customer Satisfaction in the Context of Last-Mile Delivery using Supervised and Automatic Machine Learning

Sammanfattning: The prevalence of online shopping has steadily risen in the last few years. In response to these changes, last-mile delivery services have emerged that enable goods to reach customers within a shorter timeframe compared to traditional logistics providers. However, with decreased lead times follows greater exposure to risks that directly influence customer satisfaction. More specifically, this report aims to investigate the extent to which Supervised and Automatic Machine Learning can be leveraged to extract those features that have the highest explanatory power dictating customer ratings. The implementation suggests that Random Forest Classifier outperforms both Multi-Layer Perceptron and Support Vector Machine in predicting customer ratings on a highly imbalanced version of the dataset, while AutoML soars when the dataset is subject to undersampling. Using Permutation Feature Importance and Shapley Additive Explanations, it was further concluded that whether the delivery is on time, whether the delivery is executed within the stated time window, and whether the delivery is executed during the morning, afternoon, or evening, are paramount drivers of customer ratings.