ABC Limited is a large retail chain that sells a variety of merchandise, including groceries, clothing, appliances, and electronic goods. Currently, ABC has 175 outlets and over 1,300 employees and generates an annual revenue over 150 million US dollars.

Although ABC has always prided itself on providing excellent customer service, the company has failed to live up to its standards in recent years. Customers are not as satisfied as they used to be with their ABC shopping experience, resulting in increased rates of customer churn.

As a Big Data consultant, you start investigating into the cause of this dissatisfaction by evaluating the customer service department of each store. In each of its store, there is a customer service department that deals with product returns or other customer-related issues. Similarly, for online sales, the company runs a call center for resolving product-related issues. When dealing with an issue, the in-store system allows the customer service agents to take notes in the form of a free-form text field. The call center agents can do the same, although the calls are also recorded for training and quality assurance purposes.

You have a meeting with several managers and discuss the need to mine customer issue-related data. You inform them that most of the underlying customer issue details are recorded as free-form text, even though the system allows the agents to record customer issue-related information. This is because of the limited data entry options provided by the user interface of the system. Each conversation held over the phone holds important information about the customer issue at hand. This data is currently not being analyzed.

You explain that ABC needs to develop an understanding of what its customers think about the company individually and collectively, as this will reveal the underlying cause of the high customer churn. This will also enable the customer service agents to provide a more informed and customized response to customer queries and concerns.

You intend to analyze the call data and customer service agent notes to determine whether customers are satisfied with ABC’s service, and reveal the reasons for any customer dissatisfaction. You want to reveal all possible competitive threats, identify new business opportunities, and expose any telltale signs of customer dissatisfaction and customers who intend to cancel their orders. You also want to mine the customer service agent notes to reveal common reasons for product returns, common product issues, and any useful customer suggestions.

a) Based on the above scenario, identify the activities that need to be performed to prepare the call data and customer service agent notes for analysis, starting with the Data Acquisition and Filtering stage, and ending with the Data Aggregation and Representation stage.

2. b) Name TWO analysis techniques that can be used to achieve the required outcomes. Explain the relevance of each technique.