Data mining for customer service support

In traditional customer service support of a manufacturing environment, a customer service database usually stores two types of service information: (1) unstructured customer service reports record machine problems and its remedial actions and (2) structured data on sales, employees, and customers for day-to-day management operations. This paper investigates how to apply data mining techniques to extract knowledge from the database to support two kinds of customer service activities: decision support and machine fault diagnosis. A data mining process, based on the data mining tool DBMiner, was investigated to provide structured management data for decision support. In addition, a data mining technique that integrates neural network, case-based reasoning, and rule-based reasoning is proposed; it would search the unstructured customer service records for machine fault diagnosis. The proposed technique has been implemented to support intelligent fault diagnosis over the World Wide Web. # 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.