Understanding Emergency Call Specifics Using Technician Notes for a Leading Utility Company

THE BACKGROUND

The utility provides a hotline where consumers can call in emergencies. In the call center, they take some notes about the call and then put in a work request for a technician to investigate the cause of the call. The primary data source about what happened during the investigation is a technician note, which is entered on a tablet and records what was found on the site. The client had approximately a half million of these technician entered notes. They were confident that interesting patterns existed in the notes, but they didn’t have the tools necessary to extract that information in a useable format. They were interested in both identifying topics that they knew occurred in the data and in methods for identifying new topics in a data-driven manner.