Companies are increasingly looking at maximising the value of information within large quantities of text that is generated, acquired or exists in repositories.
Text analytics has the potential to deliver measurable benefits to organisations in a wide range of applications. Companies today would be shortsighted to ignore what their customers are saying about their products and services. For those who specialise in brand management, given the massive number of conversations that occur a daily basis, out in the open on the Internet, the only way to manage that interaction is through mechanical text analytics. Even as text analytics gains prominence, it has also emerged that it is not only important to assess how the same fits within the current corporate structure, but also how companies should approach text analytics from an organisational standpoint. For instance, in a recent interview with Text Analytics News, Sid Banerjee, chief executive officer of Reston, Virginia-based Clarabridge, mentioned that text analytics as a technology has a huge impact on customer experience management. And though companies address this within different parts of their organisation, the job is important enough to create a new functional area, led by a chief customer officer, according to Banerjee. He added that the cross functional team beneath this C-level executive would be responsible for capturing and interpreting the voice of the customer and ultimately ensuring that it’s heard across the organisation – in marketing, operations, service and IT. At the same time, given that text analytics allows more efficiency and automation, one would expect not many new additional jobs coming into the picture. In order to know more, Text Analytics News’ Ritesh Gupta spoke to Leslie Owens, analyst, Forrester Research. Excerpts: How should companies approach text analytics from an organisational standpoint? Have the companies realised that the job is important enough to create a new functional area?Leslie Owens: I think the text analytics buyers/users who are using the technology to support voice of the customer programmes are often based in customer experience or customer advocacy groups. As text analytics projects get visibility in the company, people who use the tools start needing a strategy and a process to handle the demand from different business units, like supply chain or operations. I think a typical team might have a few data analysts, a strategy/governance person,and a business analyst. I think it’s tricky for people to approach the business and ask for more headcount to support the software, because a common driver for an investment in text analytics is that it will allow more efficiency and automation i.e., less headcount! Can you elaborate on how companies are integrating insights resulting from text analytics? What new trends have you witnessed?
Leslie Owens: I think right now most companies are working with the information in the form of dashboards, alerts, and reports. There are many delivery mechanisms for this information – such as RSS feeds, saved searches, etc. But the next step is to actually act on the information from the text analytics process, in other words, to automate something or trigger a process, like a loan approval or a customer refund. Text analytics solutions should be designed to provide business units with an insight into unstructured sources while leveraging data warehouse investments and with minimal effort by IT departments. What should one be wary of as far as applying the intelligence gleaned from text analytics projects is concerned?
Leslie Owens: Of course, the first concern is how trustworthy the information is. There is also an issue with different domains using different language. People talk differently on Twitter than they do in their annual report. Buzzwords in the energy sector are different than those in finance. So when we talk about analysing information from these different sources, you need to acknowledge the credibility of the source and the domain specificity of the source. And be wary of what might be lost when mashing up insights from different inputs, like news and call center verbatims. I think it is also difficult to map social media insights with internal customer segments and records. There are new 3rd party tools that will map Twitter handles to customer records in your Salesforce system, for example. The customers I have talked to are very strong in analysis and numbers, so people should note that this is not a light and friendly technology category. It’s a good fit for people in roles in marketing, sales, research, etc as long as they have a proven skillset in interpreting data, storing and querying data and the nuances of language and communication. Specialists in this arena say that often the biggest problem for new users is getting overwhelmed once other departments and business managers see what’s possible with such tools. Buy in is a relatively quick process as the reports give managers immediate and actionable insights. The difficulty lies in prioritising the increasing demands for insight from other departments. How do you assess the situation?
Leslie Owens: I recommend a solid governance process and defining criteria for what projects get prioritised – it’s important to communicate why some projects are more critical or urgent than others. I think most companies first want to push the data to the business in a synthesized report format, then eventually support business people interacting with the data themselves. 6th Annual Text Analytics Summit 6th Annual Text Analytics Summit is scheduled to take place in Boston (May 25-26). Leslie Owens, analyst, Forrester Research is scheduled to speak at the two-day event. For more information, click here: or contact: Ben Satchwell Text Analytics News T: +44 (0) 207 375 7163
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