It appears the tech boffins are at it again – they’ve come up with a software tool that will electronically analyse what customers say, text and blog about a company. According to an article in this month’s CIO magazine, text analytics technology is able to group and categorize customer comments and then electronically produce an easy-to-read report that will pin point for senior management exactly where customer dissatisfaction lies.
The article features a case study about a hotel chain in America. Its operations analysis manager Tony Bodoh says he’s found the text analytics software created for them by Clarabridge preferable to employing survey vendors who manually read the hotel's customer survey forms:
Text analytics, often referred to as “voice of the customer technology”, is designed to squeeze sentiment out of customer communications rather than simply retrieve isolated nuggets of information, as traditional text mining does. “One of the key benefits the Clarabridge tool provides is essentially overnight categorization and clustering of all comments,” Bodoh says, “which was taking us several weeks to a month with the previous vendor.”
A very interesting article, which had me googling the term this morning to find out more. According to this piece from CRM News, text analytics is not exactly new technology – contact centres have been using this form of data mining to assess and train agents. But now it seems the marketing department has cottoned onto a way of using it and now the perception of text analytics software is changing from a product which costs the company, to one that is profit making.