Mining the Talk: Unlocking the Business Value in Unstructured Information

2. Mining Customer Interactions

This chapter will show how we use Mining the Talk techniques to solve real-world business problems using actual examples. By the end of this chapter, the reader should have a basic grasp of our methods and how they work. This chapter goes into some detail concerning how we represent information and the algorithms we employ. We hope you will find our approach surprisingly simple. The simplicity of the approach is what makes it so generally applicable to such a wide range of information sources and business problems.

In the beginning of this chapter, we set the stage by motivating Mining the Talk, comparing it to search—the most common method of accessing unstructured information. We then focus on customer interactions ...