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IBM's India Research Laboratory has developed software technology that uses math algorithms to extract and deliver business insights hidden within the large quantity of information gathered by companies during customer service calls and other interactions, according to an official at the lab.

The new business intelligence technology, called ProAct, helps organizations gain new business insights that can be used to improve customer satisfaction, develop new products and services, and find new business opportunities, which is the aim of IBM's cross-company Information on Demand strategy.

ProAct is a text analytics tool, which automates previously manual analysis and evaluation of customer service calls and provides timely insight to help companies rapidly assess and improve their performance to maximize customer satisfaction. Designed to help dramatically improve call centers, this unique IBM technology mines both structured and unstructured data, giving unprecedented access to information to change the way call center agents work, claimed IBM.

"Call centers are really giant data factories of market research: Every time a phone call, e-mail or text message comes in from a customer, it is automatically stored and in many cases either left sitting on a hard drive or being poured over manually," said Dr. Daniel Dias, director, IBM India Research Lab. "Most companies aren't even scratching the surface for what could be a gold mine of information about their products and services."

ProAct goes beyond the limitations of conventional customer service analysis tools to provide an integrated, objective analysis of structured information such as agent and product databases and unstructured data such as email, call logs, call transcription to identify reason for dissatisfaction, agent performance issues and typical product problems. This approach helps reduce subjectivity and guesswork compared to a manual analysis technique.

ProAct also can help automate a call center's tasks, enhance call center agent performance and identify new or expanded sales opportunities. Moreover, ProAct can successfully reduce the customer-agent interaction data analysis time from 10 minutes per enquiry to only 30 seconds for the entire record of data.

Based on the Unstructured Information Management Analysis (UIMA) framework that IBM contributed to the open source Apache Software Foundation in 2006, the ProAct technology was initially developed as a service engagement. Now the new algorithms are being packaged in software and deployed in many IBM call center customers around the world.