Like a lot of people who help businesses with customer feedback, these days I'm frequently being asked about Text Analytics. Sentiment analysis in particular seems to be the buzzword du jour.
Clearly, the growth of social media as a customer connecting technology has made text analytics a more important technology for categorizing and assessing large volumes of free text feedback. More importantly, as more and more companies actively solicit feedback via e-mail and web surveys more open text comments need to be evaluated. Text analytics, of course, is very valuable in this regard as well. This is particularly true if your survey tools can't filter responses on the basis of sentiment based answers (as in net promoter surveys for instance).
As usual, in emerging markets and technologies, the leading vendors are typically quite expensive and often underperform when objectively compared to solutions from less well known vendors. A situation that would appear to be occurring again with text analytics.
Having said that, I think I've found a text analytics vendor that is both reasonably priced and very effective at processing text into usable insights. The company is Etuma. They are from Finland - and impressively - can assess textual feedback in 10 different languages with 90%+ accuracy and categorize that feedback seemlessly into a single report in a single language (very useful for US companies doing business in Europe). They also do sentiment analysis at a more granular level than the leading text analytics vendors.
To my mind Etuma offers really great tool for customer support organizations that operate worldwide, or for US companies looking to do a better job assessing their foreign sourced (non english language) customer feedback.
With 10 languages "out of the box", the ability to pull all feedback into a single report and granular sentiment analysis, all in an affordable tool, Etuma would seem to be a vendor that lots of North American companies would want to talk to.
Check them out at http://www.etuma.com/
Clearly, the growth of social media as a customer connecting technology has made text analytics a more important technology for categorizing and assessing large volumes of free text feedback. More importantly, as more and more companies actively solicit feedback via e-mail and web surveys more open text comments need to be evaluated. Text analytics, of course, is very valuable in this regard as well. This is particularly true if your survey tools can't filter responses on the basis of sentiment based answers (as in net promoter surveys for instance).
As usual, in emerging markets and technologies, the leading vendors are typically quite expensive and often underperform when objectively compared to solutions from less well known vendors. A situation that would appear to be occurring again with text analytics.
Having said that, I think I've found a text analytics vendor that is both reasonably priced and very effective at processing text into usable insights. The company is Etuma. They are from Finland - and impressively - can assess textual feedback in 10 different languages with 90%+ accuracy and categorize that feedback seemlessly into a single report in a single language (very useful for US companies doing business in Europe). They also do sentiment analysis at a more granular level than the leading text analytics vendors.
To my mind Etuma offers really great tool for customer support organizations that operate worldwide, or for US companies looking to do a better job assessing their foreign sourced (non english language) customer feedback.
With 10 languages "out of the box", the ability to pull all feedback into a single report and granular sentiment analysis, all in an affordable tool, Etuma would seem to be a vendor that lots of North American companies would want to talk to.
Check them out at http://www.etuma.com/
