Mining the “Voice of the Customer” for Business Prioritization

  • Authors:
  • Wei Peng;Tong Sun;Shriram Revankar;Tao Li

  • Affiliations:
  • Xerox Corporation;Xerox Corporation;Xerox Corporation;Florida International University

  • Venue:
  • ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (TIST)
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

To gain competitiveness and sustained growth in the 21st century, most businesses are on a mission to become more customer-centric. In order to succeed in this endeavor, it is crucial not only to synthesize and analyze the VOC (the VOice of the Customer) data (i.e., the feedbacks or requirements raised by customers), but also to quickly turn these data into actionable knowledge. Although there are many technologies being developed in this complex problem space, most existing approaches in analyzing customer requests are ad hoc, time-consuming, error-prone, people-based processes which hardly scale well as the quantity of customer information explodes. This often results in the slow response to customer requests. In this article, in order to mine VOC to extract useful knowledge for the best product or service quality, we develop a hybrid framework that integrates domain knowledge with data-driven approaches to analyze the semi-structured customer requests. The framework consists of capturing functional features, discovering the overlap or correlation among the features, and identifying the evolving feature trend by using the knowledge transformation model. In addition, since understanding the relative importance of the individual customer request is very critical and has a direct impact on the effective prioritization in the development process, we develop a novel semantic enhanced link-based ranking (SELRank) algorithm for relatively rating/ranking both customer requests and products. The framework has been successfully applied on Xerox Office Group Feature Enhancement Requirements (XOG FER) datasets to analyze customer requests.