BOSTON -- Voice of the Customer programs are hot and getting hotter -- thanks largely to the maturation of text analytics technology.
That was the message yesterday from industry experts at the annual Text Analytics Summit being held here this week. The market for text analytics applications, while small, is growing rapidly. Voice of the Customer programs, also called customer experience intelligence or customer feedback management, are a big reason, according to Fran Halper, a partner at Hurwitz & Associates, a Newton, Mass.-based consultancy.
In a survey that Hurwitz & Associates conducted last year of 118 companies with revenue over $200 million, 49 said they were planning to deploy text analytics, and another 30 said they had already deployed the technology in some form. Among those planning to deploy text analytics, 80% were using it for customer care, according to the survey.
"At the end of the day, it's important because you want to get some sort of competitive advantage," Halper said. "It's five times as expensive to acquire new customers as it is to retain them." 数据挖掘研究院
Apparently, text analytics is paying off. The majority of firms surveyed that are using the technology have achieved a return on their investment within one year, according to Hurwitz.
Text analytics and financial services
Charles Schwab and Co. Inc., the San Francisco-based financial services firm, is hoping to reap some of those returns. It has launched a Voice of the Customer program analyzing survey responses and is planning to extend the application to analyze text from notes and comment fields in its sales and contact center applications.
Representatives from the company's in-house analytics group spoke about their project at the summit. The analytics group works within the marketing department, conducting statistical analysis and modeling for the entire company, and has been analyzing structured data for years.
"When it comes to the free-form text field data, we ran into a lot of challenges," said Catherine Lee, director of advanced analytics. "For a long time, we had to manually review it all. It's time-consuming, costly and not scalable. We know there are a lot of golden nuggets in text field that remained unmined." 数据挖掘工具
Three years ago, Schwab began exploring text analytics and just recently selected an application from Attensity Corp., of Palo Alto, Calif. Initially, Schwab had Attensity complete a proof of concept to evaluate the system's speed and ease of extracting information from the customer feedback notes, as well as how it combines the text information with other business data.
Six months ago, after successfully completing the proof of concept, Lee brought the application to Guy Bayes, the director of technology.
It's all about the ETL
Attensity's technology works similarly to extract, transform and load (ETL) tools in taking unstructured data from one system, parsing it and putting it into a data model, Bayes noted.
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