Application of data mining techniques for improving customer services

Data mining is the process of discovering interesting knowledge such as patterns, associations, changes, anomalies and significant structures from large amounts of data stored in databases. This helps analyze. understand. or even visualize the huge amounts of stored data gathered from business and scientific applications. A number or data mining applications have emerged for a variety of domains including marketing. banking, finance, manufacturing and health care. In traditional customer service support. most manufacturing companies store their customer service reports, that record machine problems (or fault-conditions) and its remedial actions (or checkpoint solutions) taken to rectify the problems, in a customer service database. In addition. for management purposes. structured data on sales, employees and customers are also stored. As such. the customer service database serves as a repository of invaluable information and knowledge that can be utilized to improve Customer services. This paper discusses the application of data mining techniques to extract knowledge from a customer service database for improving customer service support.