60 seconds with... Michael House, VP Analytical Services, Maritz Research

Read on for when Text Analytics News quickly grabbed 60 seconds with Michael House, VP Analytical Services, Maritz Research...

What is the general state of the market for commercial text analysis and where is it heading?

The industry has definitely moved from a new leading-edge technology to become main stream and continues to improve and grow.  The vendors we work with are all experiencing substantial growth.  We expect this growth to continue.

Maritz Research works with many clients to meet their research needs supporting customer experience management.  Few of our clients are unaware of text analytics; the majority has either implemented a text analytic solution or is exploring how to meet the need. We’ve seen continuous growth in demand for text analysis and categorization of survey data and integrating other sources of customer feedback, as well as consultative support on text analytic applications and solutions.

Are there any technologies and/or solutions that have shaken up the market?

A couple of solutions come to mind.  The first is the ability to use applications through SaaS.  As a market research firm, we use several text analytic applications bring the best technological solutions to bear to meet our client’s needs.  SaaS allows us to try out and use applications with minimal upfront investment, and minimizes the time needed to get custom solutions up and running.

The second is the capability to efficiently collect and process customer opinion from public sources including consumer generated media.  This has enabled the research industry to use these ‘word of mouse’ sources in collaboration with survey feedback for improving the customer experience.

In terms of examples of where sentiment analysis is currently being used, what main examples would you mention and how do they compare to the potential of the market?

For customer experience research, we use sentiment to discern the tone of customer feedback by topic/category.  Generating trends of negative sentiment in a category facilitates identifying emerging issues – in either social media or customer feedback comments.

From a more practical standpoint, we see a trend toward replacing the assignment of positive/negative versions of a category (code in market research) to using sentiment scoring to provide a more consistent and sensitive measure that can be just as accurate.

What impact is social media having on moulding the future development of text mining solutions?

As mentioned above, in customer experience research we have seen a shift from using only primary Voice of the Customer (VOC) sources, such as surveys, to relying more on secondary sources, such as social media.  Our clients continue rely on surveys to collect feedback on their performance in meeting the brand promise, but also for benchmarking and calibrating information from other sources.  Facilitating the integration of results and insights across this myriad of sources will be a key focus for text mining solutions.

How do you forecast the industry panning out over the next 12 -18 months?

Text Analytics has moved to become a mainstream technology across many industry sectors.  We expect to see continued growth across the text analytic industry, as well as continued specialization and evolution of the applications.

From our perspective as a research company, we are seeing some convergence of text analytics and the media monitoring/listening platform vendors.  Several business-user oriented vendors are partnering with media monitoring companies to collect and pre-process web content for use in their applications in addition to private sources.  This combination provides solutions similar to many media monitoring companies.  
 

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