Leveraging Unstructured Data to Detect Emerging Reliability Issues
This addresses a domain-specific problem for service providers by enabling early detection of reliability issues, but it appears incremental as it applies existing text mining concepts to a new context.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting emerging reliability issues in after-sales service by analyzing unstructured data like customer complaints and technician comments, introducing a text mining method to enable proactive detection and corrective actions such as recalls.
Unstructured data refers to information that does not have a predefined data model or is not organized in a pre-defined manner. Loosely speaking, unstructured data refers to text data that is generated by humans. In after-sales service businesses, there are two main sources of unstructured data: customer complaints, which generally describe symptoms, and technician comments, which outline diagnostics and treatment information. A legitimate customer complaint can eventually be tracked to a failure or a claim. However, there is a delay between the time of a customer complaint and the time of a failure or a claim. A proactive strategy aimed at analyzing customer complaints for symptoms can help service providers detect reliability problems in advance and initiate corrective actions such as recalls. This paper introduces essential text mining concepts in the context of reliability analysis and a method to detect emerging reliability issues. The application of the method is illustrated using a case study.