The 1823 Call Centre of the Hong Kong government’s Efficiency Unit acts as a single point of contact for handling public inquiries and complaints on behalf of many government departments. 1823 operates round-the-clock, including during Sundays and public holidays. Each year, it answers about 2.65 million calls and 98,000 e-mails, including inquiries, suggestions, and complaints. “Having received so many calls and e-mails, we gather substantial volumes of data. The next step is to make sense of the data,” says the Efficiency Unit’s assistant director, W. F. Yuk. “Now, with SAS text mining technologies, we can obtain deep insights through uncovering the hidden relationship between words and sentences of complaints information, spot emerging trends and public concerns, and produce high-quality complaints intelligence for the departments we serve.”

Questions for Discussion
1. How did the Hong Kong government use text mining to better serve its constituents?
2. What were the challenges, the proposed solution, and the obtained results?