Mining Actionable Knowledge for Domain-Driven and Customer-Centric Decision Support

It has been increasingly critical for businesses to become more customer-centric and more responsive for customer needs. The “voice of customer” (VOC in short) is a general term to describe the stated and unstated customer needs that can be captured through various customer touchpoints: sales meetings, surveys, interviews, focus groups, customer support call-center, social media sites, etc.. Most existing approaches in analyzing VOC focus on mining patterns of significant technical interestingness, which are mainly concerned with the data mining method used, but not necessarily meaningful to business problems. To discover knowledge from VOC dataset that can be used for taking actions to business advantages, we develop a hybrid framework that tightly integrates domain knowledge and decision making principles with data-driven approaches. The proposed framework provides following actionable insights: (1) uncover the main themes and the evolving trends of customer needs; (2) identify the gaps between ever-changing customer needs and the service/product provider strategy and development organization structure; (3) effectively prioritize both customer needs and service/product offerings simultaneously by taking into account of customer demography and purchase history, via a novel Semantic Enhanced Link-based Ranking (SELRank) algorithm as described in this paper. This analytical framework that inherently embodies domain specific knowledge has been successfully applied on Xerox Office Group semi-structured VOC dataset to support customer-centric business decisions in both short-term and long-term service/product planning, and adaptive transformation of development organizations.