In a world where most businesses doing customer and employee types of feedback still "code" their verbatim survey responses and other text feedback manually, the standard for "break even" on automated text analysis solutions generally seems to be on the order of ten thousand 10,000 text items per month.
Why is 10,000 the number? In my experience, I've seen many instances where smaller volumes would justify investment in an automated solution. Yet, to a large degree only very large businesses and government agencies with big flows of text based feedback have adopted automated text analysis solutions.
I think there are two reasons for this. First is the price of the automated text analysis solutions, which typically have minimum annual costs of $100,000 per year. So, for a business with lots of text to be coded, only when "people costs" exceed $100k/year does it make sense to invest in an automated solution. The second reason is that people rarely do just verbatim coding in businesses today. Typically groups of people do the work in different departments as part of their regular jobs (VOC Analyst, Market Research manager, etc.). There's often no single FTE that can be "replaced" by an automated solution. Only when the volumes of feedback become so large as to be overwhelming do businesses consider automating the analysis process. By then, the costs of manual coding are large and they justify a large investment.
But, what would happen if the annual software cost of an automated text analysis solution could be lowered to $50,000 per year? I think that the potential market for automated text analysis would become exponentially larger. After all, in most businesses its a lot easier to find half of an FTE doing text analysis manually than it is to find full FTEs manually doing text analysis.
In my opinion, there are additional reasons to consider automating text analysis at lower levels of feedback than 10K per month. Just one is the ability of an automated solution to identify new topics. As someone who does a number of feedback projects that employ survey based open answer questions, I regularly evaluate verbatim responses both manually and via automation. Whenever I've used etuma360 I've found that the etuma analysis identifies topics which I had not considered based on my manual inspection process. And, since people doing manual coding have a propensity to map all the incoming feedback using the existing coding structure and categories, manual processes will tend to miss new topics. Automated solutions will typically pick up the new topics. Valuing this capability is difficult though. But, its something to consider when looking at text analysis and its cost benefit.
Etuma has a number of pricing plans that allow businesses to get into automated text analysis for less than the $100K/Year price point. I would think that anyone with 2,000 pieces of text feedback per month would be candidates for an etuma360 implementation based on FTE considerations alone.
Why is 10,000 the number? In my experience, I've seen many instances where smaller volumes would justify investment in an automated solution. Yet, to a large degree only very large businesses and government agencies with big flows of text based feedback have adopted automated text analysis solutions.
I think there are two reasons for this. First is the price of the automated text analysis solutions, which typically have minimum annual costs of $100,000 per year. So, for a business with lots of text to be coded, only when "people costs" exceed $100k/year does it make sense to invest in an automated solution. The second reason is that people rarely do just verbatim coding in businesses today. Typically groups of people do the work in different departments as part of their regular jobs (VOC Analyst, Market Research manager, etc.). There's often no single FTE that can be "replaced" by an automated solution. Only when the volumes of feedback become so large as to be overwhelming do businesses consider automating the analysis process. By then, the costs of manual coding are large and they justify a large investment.
But, what would happen if the annual software cost of an automated text analysis solution could be lowered to $50,000 per year? I think that the potential market for automated text analysis would become exponentially larger. After all, in most businesses its a lot easier to find half of an FTE doing text analysis manually than it is to find full FTEs manually doing text analysis.
In my opinion, there are additional reasons to consider automating text analysis at lower levels of feedback than 10K per month. Just one is the ability of an automated solution to identify new topics. As someone who does a number of feedback projects that employ survey based open answer questions, I regularly evaluate verbatim responses both manually and via automation. Whenever I've used etuma360 I've found that the etuma analysis identifies topics which I had not considered based on my manual inspection process. And, since people doing manual coding have a propensity to map all the incoming feedback using the existing coding structure and categories, manual processes will tend to miss new topics. Automated solutions will typically pick up the new topics. Valuing this capability is difficult though. But, its something to consider when looking at text analysis and its cost benefit.
Etuma has a number of pricing plans that allow businesses to get into automated text analysis for less than the $100K/Year price point. I would think that anyone with 2,000 pieces of text feedback per month would be candidates for an etuma360 implementation based on FTE considerations alone.
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