Customer Information System for Product and Service Management: Towards Knowledge Extraction from Textual and Mixed-Format Data

With the business mantra "know thy customer", companies now deploy information technology to elicit customer needs from the vast amount of data collected. Although various techniques and systems have been developed for the analysis of structured data, relatively few efforts have been placed on textual and mixed format data analysis. In this paper, we propose to develop a Customer Information System to efficiently extract customer knowledge from structured and textual data using computational intelligence approaches. The system assists companies to identify profitable market and discover customer needs patterns. We discuss challenging issues in the development of such a system and describe methodologies to deal with them. Based on the relevant textual information collected, the proposed system allows companies to effectively respond to changes in customer needs and create values for customers.