My friends at Etuma recently put out a post titled "9 Reasons why you shouldn't wait to implement a verbatim analysis solution. Click Here to read the blog post in its entirety. I liked the article enough that I thought I should reiterate the points and expound upon the underlying needs for actionable data that companies today have. Summarizing the Etuma post:1. Leading companies in many industries have well developed customer listening skills. Most customer listening remains survey driven, but increasingly it is becoming omni-channel (meaning surveys plus social media) are quite well. Your competitors are learning and transforming how they react to the customer's voice. Your company needs to as well.
2. Customer needs are becoming harder to predict. You need to have data that can feed analytical and predictive analysis tools in order to more rapidly detect emerging trends. Verbatim feedback is one of the data sources predictive analysis relies upon.
3. Paying people to decipher and report on customer interactions provides expensive and inconsistent data.
Feedback enters the call center from phone, emails, web forms and chat logs. Once calls are transcribed it's all unstructured open-text data and can be fed to verbatim analysis systems.
4. Front-line staff turnover is often quite high in contact centers - compounding the issues in #3 above by requiring constant training and monitoring to provide some consistency of results.
5. Many companies do not get customer feedback directly. As most of their products are sold indirectly, feedback is only as good as the filtering mechanisms that exist in their distribution networks. i.e. It is usually not good. Verbatim feedback lets product vendors monitor 3rd party review or web sites and detect issues and trends without feedback being filtered by the distribution network.
6. New products and services are introduced constantly. Detecting the presence of a new product or its impact on existing offerings is a lot easier when that information is extracted from customer comment automatically.
7. Just like new products, new competitors are much easier to detect when data sources are being analyzed and regularly.
8. Omni-channel marketing and sales makes the customer journey complex. Shopping has become more complicated. The customer journey can now involve many interactions with the company. Capturing those interactions and understanding them consistently and quickly is important and much easier with automated verbatim analysis.
9. Social media complicates communications and crisis management. Getting quicker understanding of issues makes reacting to them a lot easier and the reactions can be much better planned.
Etuma makes the general point in the post that topic / issue detection and sentiment change detection are critical capabilities for organizations to have these days. And, especially so where a company doesn't get direct access to feedback. The point I would make about the urgency of implementing text analysis capabilities is the "Don't know what you don't know" factor. Meaning that without tools to detect issues and sentiment changes (Things you don't know), businesses Don't know What they Don't know.
In today's world, not knowing something important for any length of time tends to have associated costs. By the time a business learns what it needs to know about something, it may be too late to fix a problem, create a new product, add a new service or otherwise react to customer needs in effective ways.
The urgency of adopting automated text analysis solutions is clearly high. Hopefully more businesses will do so sooner rather than later.
