Decoding Social Messages from Complaints Intelligence System

Thursday, 9 February 2012

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Efficiency Unit helps government departments uncover public concerns using SAS

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SPOTLIGHT

The 1823 Call Centre of the Hong Kong government’s Efficiency Unit acts as a single point of contact for handling public enquiries and complaints on behalf of many government departments. 1823 operates round-the-clock, including during Sundays and public holidays. In 2008, it answered 2.65 million calls and 98,000 e-mails, spanning enquiries, suggestions and complaints.

“Having received so many calls and emails, 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.”

Building a Complaints Intelligence System
The Efficiency Unit aims to bethe preferred consulting partner for all government bureaux and departments and to advance the delivery of world-class public services to the people of Hong Kong. The Unit launched the 1823 Call Centre in 2001. One of 1823’s main functions is handling complaints – 10 percent of the calls received last year were complaints. The Efficiency Unit recognised there are social messages hidden in these complaints data, which provides important feedback on public service and highlights opportunities for service improvement. Rather than simply handling calls and emails, the Unit seeks to use the complaints information collected to gain a better understanding of daily issues for the public.

“We previously compiled some reports on complaint statistics for reference by government departments,” says Mr Yuk. “However, through ‘eyeball’ observations, it was absolutely impossible to effectively reveal new or more complex potential public issues, and identify their root causes, as most of the complaints were recorded in unstructured textual format.”

Aiming to build a platform, called the Complaints Intelligence System, the Unit required a robust and powerful suite of text processing and mining solutions that could uncover the trends, patterns and relationships, and to unveil the insights inherent in the complaints.

Uncovering hidden root-causes of issues from unstructured data
The Efficiency Unit chose to deploy SAS Text Miner, which can access and analyse various text formats, including emails received by the 1823 Call Centre. “The solution consolidates all information, and uncovers hidden relationships through statistical modelling analyses,” says Mr Yuk. “It helps us understand hidden social issues, so that government departments can discover them before they become serious, and thus seize the opportunities for service improvement.”

Equipped with insights into trends, together with other results of the root-cause analyses, the departments can better understand underlying issues, and quickly respond even as situations evolve. Senior management can access to accurate, up-todate information from the Complaints Intelligence System.