Process Mining for
Customer Support Haim Toeg
supportagility.com
Process mining is a discipline positioned at the crossroads of computational intelligence, data mining, and process modeling and analysis. The idea of process mining is to discover, monitor and improve real processes by extracting knowledge from the event logs produced as part of on-going business activity.
Adapted from Process Mining Manifesto
What Is Process Mining?
Process Aware System Lifecycle
Some reasons support may adapt well to Process Mining: * Highly disciplined * Heavily instrumented and regimented * Fairly well documented processes * Culture of metrics and improvement
Why Support?
* Business: Do More With Less * Efficiency and Effectiveness
* Reduce cost / case or / customer -‐> Operational metrics * Case life, backlog, time since last touched * Cases / installation * Improve effectiveness -‐> Result metrics * NPS, CSAT * Correlate and analyze data * Prioritized action list
Process Improvement Goals
* Greater granularity <-‐> abstraction * Drill down to individual process elements * Segregate data by operational element (geo, product) * Combine process elements to study overall activity
Improving Process Improvement
Yes, we do!
But, We Don’t Have The Data
Traditional Operation
Weaknesses? * Reliance on generalized metrics * Anecdotal review of one or small number of process instances * Limited ability to drill down and investigate * Not much abstraction ability either * Event logs used only sporadically and reactively
Familiar?
With Process Mining – Discovery
* Model the executed, real-‐world, processes * Identify and review process variants * Discover informal collaboration and knowledge * Investigate and measure every action and transition * Support for Lean perspectives * Workload / People perspectives
Discovery Benefits
Discovery Results
Case flow via activities: Process flow: • Activity Frequency Bottlenecks: • Critical activities and
paths • Investigate operational
metrics
Lean Resource Perspective
Activity flow through cases: • Most demanding cases • Case idle times
Bottleneck Identification
Critical Resources: • People • Machines
Collaboration
Flow of work through specific people or resources: • Knowledge centers • Critical resources
Conformance
Combine your existing and discovered process models: * Find degree of conformance between the two * Understand repeat offences and take corrective action * Systems * Processes * Metrics * People
* Estimate cost and benefit of alignment vs. no action
Conformance Benefits
Conformance Report
* Leverage existing data using recently developed leading edge techniques * Review executed processes in detail to get: * Excessively repeated activities * Process bottlenecks * Critical resources * Knowledge hoarding * Drive systematic, prioritized process and organizational improvement
Process Mining for Support
Eliminate The Disconnect