Learning a faceted customer segmentation for discovering new business opportunities at Intel

TL;DR

This paper presents a large-scale, multi-lingual deep learning system that mines web data to create a faceted customer segmentation, aiding Intel's sales team in discovering new markets and opportunities efficiently.

Contribution

The paper introduces a semi-supervised, multi-label deep learning approach combined with external data enrichment to classify companies into industry and role facets at scale.

Findings

Significant improvement in customer discovery performance.

Real-time indexing of tens of millions of entities.

Effective multi-lingual, multi-faceted classification system.

Abstract

For sales and marketing organizations within large enterprises, identifying and understanding new markets, customers and partners is a key challenge. Intel's Sales and Marketing Group (SMG) faces similar challenges while growing in new markets and domains and evolving its existing business. In today's complex technological and commercial landscape, there is need for intelligent automation supporting a fine-grained understanding of businesses in order to help SMG sift through millions of companies across many geographies and languages and identify relevant directions. We present a system developed in our company that mines millions of public business web pages, and extracts a faceted customer representation. We focus on two key customer aspects that are essential for finding relevant opportunities: industry segments (ranging from broad verticals such as healthcare, to more specific fields such as 'video analytics') and functional roles (e.g., 'manufacturer' or 'retail'). To address the challenge of labeled data collection, we enrich our data with external information gleaned from Wikipedia, and develop a semi-supervised multi-label, multi-lingual deep learning model that parses customer website texts and classifies them into their respective facets. Our system scans and indexes companies as part of a large-scale knowledge graph that currently holds tens of millions of connected entities with thousands being fetched, enriched and connected to the graph by the hour in real time, and also supports knowledge and insight discovery. In experiments conducted in our company, we are able to significantly boost the performance of sales personnel in the task of discovering new customers and commercial partnership opportunities.