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One of customer relationship management (CRM) activities involves soliciting customer feedback on product and service quality and the resolution of customer complaints. Inevitably, companies must deal with large number of CRM messages from their customers either through e‐mails or from work logs. Going through those messages is an important but tedious task for managers or CRM specialists in order to make strategic plans on where to place the resources to achieve better CRM results. In this paper, we present a methodology for making sense out of CRM messages based on text clustering and summary techniques. The unique features of CRM messages are the short message length and frequent availability of correlated CRM ratings. We propose several novel techniques including organizational concept space, Web mining of similarity relationships between concepts, and correlated analysis of text and ratings. We have tested the basic concepts and techniques of CRM Sense Maker in a business setting where customer surveys are used to set strategic directions in customer services.

To introduce the special issue on “Genres of digital documents.” While there are many definitions of genre, most include consideration of the intended communicative purpose, form and sometimes expected content of a document. Most also include the notion of social acceptance, that a document is of a particular genre to the extent that it is recognized as such within a given discourse community.

The article reviews the notion of document genre and its applicability to studies of digital documents and introduces the four articles in the special issue.

Genre can be studied based on intrinsic genre attributes or on the extrinsic function that genre fulfills in human activities. Studies on intrinsic attributes include classifications of genres as clusters of attributes, though these classifications can be problematic because documents can be used in flexible ways. Also, new information technologies have enabled the appearance of novel genres. Studies on extrinsic function include ways to use genre for education or information accesses, as well as the use of genre as a lens for understanding communications in organizations. The four articles in the special issue illustrate these approaches.

The paper provides a framework that organizes the range of research about genres of digital documents that should be helpful to those reading this research or planning their own studies.