Applying a Smart Text Classification System for Customer Support Tickets

I want to build a text classification system that can automatically categorize customer support tickets into predefined categories (billing, technical, account, product). The system should:

  1. Accept text input from customer tickets
  2. Process and clean the text data
  3. Classify the ticket into one of the predefined categories
  4. Return confidence scores for the classification

Requirements:

  • Use Python and relevant ML libraries
  • Handle common text preprocessing tasks
  • Support at least 4 categories
  • Include sample training data format
  • Provide evaluation metrics

What would be the best approach to implement this system, and what specific techniques should I use for optimal classification accuracy?