Currently, there is an explosion of freeform text information being generated by consumers. Studies show that as much as 80% of the information that is created in a corporation is freeform or text in nature. At the same time, computer technology can not accurately process and understand language in its traditional form because computers are made to simply match patterns, compare and sort. Therefore, companies are missing or ignoring a large percentage of the valuable information that could be helpful to their business.
Since the revolution of the Internet, paying attention to this type of information has become even more important. Consumers now generate an incredible amount of online content by posting comments that are publicly available to everyone. Most compelling, this is information that is not being said to the companies themselves, but to the world at large.
Companies have numerous internal systems such as call centers, email and automated feedback systems to gather and manage customer information. However, public Internet comments are posted for all to see, providing low-cost access to relevant customer thoughts and feelings about a company and its competitors. Businesses and their competitors can use this information to do competitive research, understand general market trends, and pinpoint emerging problems early on in the product development lifecycle.
However, due to the freeform nature and sheer volume of this information, it is an expensive and cumbersome process to gather and understand unstructured data. Transaction or feedback surveys typically contain one or more verbatim questions such as, “How can we improve?” or “Please describe the problem you had.” Responses to these are typically very helpful individually. But what if you had a few thousand? How would you summarize them?
For these reasons, businesses are turning to text analytics systems and technologies to automatically process and analyze text in all its forms and transform it to be utilized in identifying trends, early warning signs, product issues, suggestions for improvement, and cries for help from customers. We will be getting into more details about text analytics in the future….so stay tuned.
[...] when you combine structured data with unstructured data, such as freeform replies to open-ended survey questions or comments on the Internet, you add [...]