Communications Mining: in action

From clients and customers to staff and stakeholders, communication is the lifeblood that fuels every interaction in the world of business. But what do you do when the volume of communications data grows to the point where it’s impossible to manage effectively? The answer lies in communications mining.

Most of the information within organizations is unstructured – about 80 percent, to be specific. That is to say, it’s in emails and other messages that people send to each other. While humans can process these well, it’s far harder for software to cope with. Algorithms tend to prefer nice, tidy columns of data to process. 

This means the vast majority of information businesses hold cannot be used for automation purposes and requires a human to intervene. For example, responding to a message or taking an action. This is a problem, because almost half of all employee interaction time is spent managing emails and associated tasks. It’s incredibly inefficient. 

So, how can communications mining help? And more importantly, how does it actually work?

What is communications mining?

Communications mining is the process of taking information from a communication, such as an email, a text, a ticket or a social post, and analyzing the data within as a way to gain valuable insights. 

The technology mines this unstructured data, identifying patterns and trends from a high volume of communications to help organizations uncover meaningful information for businesses to confidently make data-driven decisions. This can enhance customer experiences, improve operational efficiency and supports various business functions like HR, IT support, customer service and marketing.

The real highlight of communications mining lies in its simplicity; its zero-code user experience enables effortless implementation for any user to deploy it within a matter of hours, rather than weeks.

How comms mining works

As with many new technologies, it’s hard to picture how communications mining will benefit an organization without seeing it in action. So, let’s put it into a real-world scenario to better paint the positive impact.

Customer-facing businesses often have entire departments dedicated to handling transactional requests, such as order cancellations, returns or order status inquiries, particularly e-commerce companies. More often than not, they’ll have automated triage systems in place to help handle the requests. In spite of this, keeping up with it is a losing battle, which leads to staff wasting valuable time responding to emails and requests.

Through natural language processing and sentiment analysis, communications mining can automatically process and triage the incoming customer messages, assess the nature of the request, identify keywords and analyze the sentiment expressed by the customer. Using predefined rules and algorithms, the system then directs, say an email asking for a change of delivery address, to the right person or department in a matter of seconds. Optimizing the management of messages results in faster response times and more efficient resource allocation. As a result, customers receive prompt and accurate assistance, leading to improved satisfaction and a better experience for both customers and staff.

Communications mining can improve customer satisfaction 

Ultimately, customers are what keep businesses alive. Even so, only 29% of businesses integrate customer needs into their decisions. When trying to find out more about their customers, most will deploy customer satisfaction surveys or relentless “how did we do?” review emails. Still, they’re too infrequent, and most customers will rarely give feedback. But comms mining can instead help to find the customer’s voice.

Using it to comb through customer service emails and extract structured data that can be automated and analyzed, communications mining can provide insights into customer satisfaction and calculate the Net Emotional Value (NEV) to measure customer experience from every email interaction. This can then be leveraged to create a service that better fits with what customers need and are looking for.

Using comms mining to uncover patterns and resolve process issues

But communications mining offers more benefits than that. It offers a way to uncover the root causes of the issues that people are facing, whether staff or customers. Imagine a fleet of trucks operated by a logistics company, with engineers dispatched to repair them and file detailed reports. 

Now, enter communications mining. This powerful tool unlocks real-life insights into the entire fleet, shedding light on common issues specific to certain truck models or makes. With these insights, operations teams can make proactive changes to service rotations, ensuring timely maintenance and minimizing downtime. 

What’s more, engineers can even anticipate common problems ahead of their visits, ordering necessary parts in advance. The result? Enhanced efficiencies, smoother operations, and less downtime, are all made possible by harnessing the potential of communications mining.