Summary:
Honda leverages IBM Watson Explorer to analyse big amounts of unstructured customer feedback. The company's quality assurance division uses the Explorer to understand received messages IBM Watson Explorer helps Honda’s quality assurance division understand received messages and make sense of the enormous amount of customer feedback, which are mainly unstructured.
Problem:
Honda's process for gathering customer feedback about issues and classifying this information (e.g., whether similar symptoms have already been reported in the other data sources, whether the issues had already been solved by Honda, whether the issue is warranty related) was extremely time consuming as individuals had to read and classify each message, which averages about 310,000 message per month in Japan alone.
Moreover, Honda's regional organizational structure meant each region was responsible for dealing with customer feedback from that region, which made it more difficult to aggregate input from multiple regions and search for global quality or part failure patterns. According to Honda, QA employees spent up to three hours per day reading and reviewing customer feedback, including warranty claims. Honda needed a way to automate all this manual work and effort.