Text Analysis as a Service - Low Cost, Highly Consistent Analysis

I have long wondered if there is a market opportunity for "one off" Text Analysis projects that utilize automated solutions.  It seems to me that the benefits of automated text analysis are equally valid at smaller sample sizes than the 10-20,000 verbatim comments per month that most Text Analysis vendors need to make the ROI to work. 

So, I have decided to try and test my theory by offering automated Text Analysis to the market as a service.

The service will essentially allow anyone with a customer, employee, partner or other survey to send in an MS Excel file and receive back a report detailing topics and associated sentiment for a given set of survey verbatims.  I'll also also be able to generate some number of filtered data subsets, based on background variables, whereby a topic / sentiment analysis on verbatims could be generated for a subset of a company's verbatims such as, for instance, "Detractors" or "Promoters" in an NPS scenario.

Sample Etuma360 Verbatim Analysis

I'm looking for a few test accounts that have significant amounts of survey verbatims they'd like to analyze.  My initial pricing model would be $1,000.00 for up to 2500 verbatim comments and $2,000.00 for up to 5000 verbatim comments.  At higher amounts of verbatim comments pricing would be TBD. 

The software that I use (Etuma) has a series of industry specific templates designed to easily interpret verbatim comments from customers, employees and others.  So, no set up is required to analyze the data. 

If anyone is interested in trying out the service you can contact me at: stew.nash2010@gmail.com.  Or you can click on the link below for a contact form and I will reach out to you after you complete it.  For the contact form Click Here.

Examples of the kind of report data that will come back from the service can be accessed at www.etuma.com.  I will provide specific examples as part of each engagement.

More Consolidation in the EFM space

A little over a year ago I wrote a piece on the consolidation occurring in the EFM market.  Just prior to the post being written QuestBack had announced the acquisition of Global Park, Germany's largest EFM player.  The subject of the post was the acquisition of Vovici by Verint a large vendor of contact center solutions.  The post I wrote can be found here.

Since July of last year SurveyMonkey has made two important transactions.  First acquiring a 50% stake in ClickTools, a UK based EFM vendor.  And, second the acquisition of the Zoomerang and Panels businesses from MarketTools. 

And, yesterday, MarketTools took the additional step of selling it's remaining EFM business -CustomerSat - to ConfirmIt, of Oslo Norway.  Consolidation in the EFM space is clearly continuing.  I expect more to come. 

So what is the rationale behind all this merger activity?  I have some thoughts and opinions....

Thought #1.  The EFM space is getting crowded at the top end of the market.  Gartner, Forrester, Aberdeen and others have been beating the drum for Enterprise Feedback Management for a long time, at least five years by my count.  Since most of the EFM vendors focus their efforts on selling to  "Enterprise" class customers, as time has passed more of them have adopted solutions, leaving less growth available to the rest of the players.  Hence, acquisitions of high-end products.

Thought #2.  Serving the small and mid-tier customer segments normally requires that companies have either scale or distribution in order to effectively market.  SurveyMonkey has scale, QuestBack has distribution (I'm a QB reseller), Vovici has partnerships (Oracle in particular) and ConfirmIt now has scale at the high end of the market. 

Thought #3.  Many of the smaller players in the EFM market have neither scale nor distribution.  They have to rely on organic growth while competing with larger, better funded and more effectively structured companies.  It is amongst this group of companies that I expect to see further consolidations.  Some companies on the list:  Qualtrics, Medallia, Satmetrix, Allegiance, SNAP surveys and KeySurveys.  These firms serve Enterprise customers or mid-tier customers using a direct sales or assisted direct sales model.  They could all use more scale, more distribution or both.

All markets undergo consolidation eventually as they mature.  EFM is maturing and so is consolidating. 

Stewart Nash - stew.nash2010@gmail.com





 

Another "Super Promoter" discussion

In my last post I discussed an example of "Super promoters".   People who are both "promoters" in the net promoter context and who "report recommending a lot more" than the average promoter does. In the example I cited, a soccer club, "super promoters" also exhibited other value adding characteristics to the organization, making them very valuable to the organization in a number of dimensions.

Earlier today, in the "Customer Experience Professionals" forum on LinkedIn I saw a post on Customer Advocacy citing a recent study by Market Probe on Bank customers: "2012 Retail Banking Customer Advocacy Monitor".   To read the Market Probe's blog post Click here:

The folks at Market Probe use a term called "Advocates".  I equate "Advocates" to "super promoters". They define Customer Advocacy as:

"Customer Advocacy is a metric involving two constructs: (a) Reports of Recent Expressive Behaviors - How often a customer has recently made positive or negative statements about their bank to others, and (b) Attitudes – The emotional response to their bank that fuels or powers this expressive behavior. Rather than stop at hypothetically-asking a customer their likelihood to recommend, we go beyond that and ask how many times have they spoken positively or negatively about their bank."

The two things Market Probe is measuring: emotional attachment and recommendation behavior seem to be very similar what I'm measuring using the "likely to recommend" question (emotional attachment) and the "how of often have you recommended" question (recommendation behavior).

I don't know Market Probe's entire methodology, so I'm not sure what questions they are asking to determine emotional attachment.  But, it seems to me that for organizations seeking a simple way to get to the same place, the two questions I've used may work.

I encourage readers to look at Market Probe's research on Advocates. The article in their blog I reference above has a lot of good information in it about how Advocates add value in the form of providing better profits and higher revenues to the business (retail banks in this case).

Stewart Nash - stew.nash@gmail.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
Click Here to try QuestBack