Real World UIMA Examples - Part 2

Here is another set of real world examples to help people understand how companies are leveraging UIMA to extract knowledge from unstructured information and drive business innovation.  This installment will focus on customer care solutions. What you'll find in the following paragraphs are examples of organizations that are using this technology to better understand customer issues, improve customer service and use these uncovered insights to their business advantage.

Let's start off with Daksh.  Daksh is the fastest growing business process outsourcing services provider in India, with the largest part of its business focused on providing customer care services.  You've probably heard that when you call a company's 800 number for support, you are probably getting routed to someone in India...well, these are the guys who are likely picking up the phone on the other end.  Daksh provides outsourced customer service for some of the largest financial services, technology, e-commerce, telecommunications, insurance, hospitality and airline companies in the world.  By the way, if you're wondering who these companies are, Daksh won't tell you because most of them don't want everyone knowing they are outsourcing their customer service!

So, what is Daksh doing to improve customer service for these organizations?  Well, they started out by automating the process of analyzing customer surveys. They had over 20 employees going through thousands of surveys every week for just one of their customers. They have applied UIMA enabled analytics to automatically identify the products or services referenced and categorize the types of concerns. They are even determining the customer sentiment from the tonality of what they have written to come up with a customer satisfaction score.  In initial tests, Daksh was able to attain 85% accuracy and automate the workload of 60 subject matter experts.

It's important to note that UIMA based analytics can be applied not only to text, but to audio and other types of unstructured information also.  Daksh is taking advantage of this capability by recording the calls of its agents, with UIMA enabling them to send the audio to a combination of different analyses, first a speech-to-text engine, and then a set of pattern detectors.  They are applying this technology to better assess the performance of their call center agents.  For example, in processing reservations for a major car rental agency, they found that certain agents were making bookings that led to higher pick-up rates. They analyzed the unstructured information in the call notes and from recorded audio transcripts to identify patterns found with the better agents.  They are now using that knowledge to create best practices and improve overall performance.

Daksh actually has several other projects leveraging UIMA, but I think that is enough to get your creative juices flowing around what is possible, and I want to save some time to talk about a few other companies that are doing some innovative things.

The next example I'd like to mention is how BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee (BCBS TN) is using this same technology to create a more complete, single view of their customers.  You may have seen them mentioned in an IBM press release or in a ComputerWorld article. They were building a data warehouse to create a single view of all the different health care providers the work with.  However, their customer service concerns were buried in free form text call center notes.  Understanding the types of services provided and geographies serviced could only be determined by extracting this information from government regulation web sites and web subscription services.  And the terms of their existing agreements were hidden in contracts scanned into a content management system.  They are leveraging UIMA to extract all of this knowledge from the various unstructured content sources and funnel that information into a provider dashboard that can be used both to improve customer service AND to help their sales agents better negotiate renewals of agreements with the providers.

I'll close off with the an example in the telecommunications industry.  One of Japan's premier mobile communications companies, providing voice and data communications to millions in Japan, is analyzing customer complaints and questions in real-time, as they are entered by agents or received via e-mail, and automatically matching them to candidate questions in order to generate FAQs.  The FAQs and related support information are able to be disseminated to call center operators much quicker, enabling them to dramatically improve customer service and reduce call center wait times.  Imagine how much happier you would be if you had to wait a few minutes less next time you call your cell phone company!

Hopefully this provides some additional insight into how organizations are leveraging UIMA and unstructured analytics in general to extract knowledge from the various types of content they are capturing, and use that information to drive business innovation.

Comments

[Bob DuCharme]

Marc,

Very useful weblog. Here's my question about UIMA use:
Considering how few UIMA components are listed at the CMU repository (13, with 11 from one guy and 2 from another), I'm curious about where I can find more components listed, whether for free or for sale. For your case studies, what's a typical breakdown of home-grown vs. open source vs. IBM-purchased vs. elsewhere-purchased components?

According to http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=177105271&pgno=2: "15 vendors, including Attensity, ClearForest, Cognos, Inxight, NStein and Siderean, have agreed to make their search tools UIMA-compliant." Is a complete list of the vendors available somewhere, and does it indicate which will sell UIMA components à la carte? I imagine that these vendors are more interested in selling a "complete" solution, as they say in the business.

thanks,

Bob

[Marc Andrews]

Bob,
As you could probably tell, the CMU repository is fairly new and immature. We are actually now working with them to "beef up" the catalog and start getting more people to list their annotators there. There are actually a lot of UIMA compliant components out there, but we haven't done as great a job of making this information easily accessible. We initially thought about putting together a catalog of UIMA compliant components ourselves, but decided to defer this to CMU so that it wasn't seen as too IBM biased.

In fact, many of the companies referenced in the article you listed, and in our initial press release, now have UIMA compliant components available - although most are for purchase. For example, Attensity, ClearForest, nStein, SPSS and Temis already have UIMA compliant annotators AND have made their core engines UIMA compliant. I believe Inxight has done the same, but have not had a chance to verify this. And yes, these vendors typically are trying to sell their entire platforms. Some of them have fairly good tooling for creating your own annotators, or have good "base annotators" that can be customized. That's where I believe their real value is. IBM has been working with some of them to create specific solutions, combined with other IBM software, where we are really leveraging them for these two areas.

IBM Research also has several annotators and other related UIMA components. The examples I mentioned are a fairly broad mix. One of the companies is using OmniFind as the base "unstructured content processing" platform, with ClearForest for the text analytics/extractions, and Cognos for reporting on the analysis results. Two of the examples I have discussed are using mostly IBM Research technology. If you look back at my previous set of examples (Part 1), some of those companies were developing a lot of their own annotators on top of the UIMA framework, and one had IBM's consulting organization come in and build a set of custom annotators, leveraging some IBM Research technology as a base.

I hope this answers some of your questions. I'll keep pressuring people to get their annotators posted so that people can more easily get a list of all that is available.

Thanks for reading my blog and commenting!

[panasianbiz]

Many of us realize that many of the larger companies' 800 numbers get routed to India, but what is more surprising is that some local busineses, such as newspaper customer service departments are also being routed overseas.