Derive insights and improve complaint resolutions
Company: Wayfair
Role: Data Scientist
Category: Analytics & Experimentation
Difficulty: easy
Interview Round: Take-home Project
You work on customer experience analytics for an e-commerce furniture retailer. You have 3 data tables related to customer complaints and how they were resolved.
### Table 1: `complaints`
Each row is a complaint/contact.
- `complaint_id` (string, PK)
- `customer_id` (string)
- `order_id` (string)
- `product_category` (string)
- `issue_type` (string; e.g., damaged item, late delivery, missing parts)
- `channel` (string; phone/chat/email)
- `created_at` (timestamp)
- `region` (string)
### Table 2: `resolutions`
One row per complaint resolution attempt (may be multiple per complaint).
- `resolution_id` (string, PK)
- `complaint_id` (string, FK -> complaints)
- `resolution_type` (string; e.g., refund, replacement, coupon, escalate-to-carrier)
- `resolved_at` (timestamp)
- `sla_met` (boolean)
- `refund_amount` (numeric)
### Table 3: `service_ratings`
Customer satisfaction after the resolution.
- `complaint_id` (string, FK -> complaints)
- `rating` (int 1–10; 10 = most satisfied)
- `rated_at` (timestamp)
### Questions
1. Provide **3 insights** you would try to extract from these data. (Be specific about cuts/segments and what “insight” means.)
2. Provide **3 actionable recommendations** based on those insights.
3. Choose **one prioritized recommendation** and explain *why* it should be prioritized (impact vs effort, customer value, cost, risk).
4. Describe **how you would measure success** of that recommendation:
- define a primary metric and supporting diagnostic/guardrail metrics,
- propose an evaluation method (e.g., A/B test, phased rollout, difference-in-differences),
- discuss key confounders/biases (seasonality, selection into channels, case-mix differences, delayed ratings).
5. What **risks** are associated with implementing it, and how would you mitigate them?
You may assume standard data quality issues (missing ratings, multiple resolutions per complaint, backfilled timestamps) and should call out how you’d handle them.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a data scientist's competency in customer experience analytics, causal inference, experimentation design, and multi-table data analysis by requiring synthesis of complaints, resolutions, and service ratings to generate insights and prioritized actions.