Text Analytics Use Cases - What We’re Seeing Right Now.
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What is your organization doing with all of your text data? Many initial conversations we have with folks begin with a statement like this: “I know there’s value in this data…but I don’t know how or don’t have the time to get at it."
At CompassRed, we work on all types of projects related to data. More and more our team has been working on the challenge of extracting value from text data. We love this challenge for a few reasons:
We’ve seen the value text data can create and it can be significant.
It is a hard problem to solve but we have a methodology and proprietary tools that makes it easier.
Innovation is driving step change improvements in terms of results. This is fun stuff!
Use Cases We’re Seeing
Customer feedback and interactions generate important data sources. There are a lot of high value use cases analyzing customer information.
Survey Analysis
Smart business leaders always want to understand what’s on the mind of their customers and prospects. There are many sources of text data at their disposal. Surveys are a big source, and can lend to both quantitative and qualitative results. Responses to open ended questions can provide rich insights into the consumer mindset, but often that’s at the price of many person-hours to analyze and sift through the responses. Enter text analytics. Done well, text analytics can provide insights in an instant. Well maybe not an instant but close to it, compared with the alternative.
Surveys are just scratching the surface though. The data sources are numerous. Inbound customer emails and phone calls create a similar challenge and opportunity. It takes time to categorize, and prioritize those types of queues. More and more we’re seeing companies use text analytics to understand what’s happening in those channels and the more advanced companies are building models to categories and score responses. Imagine you’re running a utility and you get hundreds of issues/tickets created in a day. How can you know which are most critical. Text analytics can surface high priority items and categories of responses.
Social Media Analysis
There is a wealth of insights to be had by mining social media posts. If your brand is big enough, you have your own properties to analyze. If you’re a small or medium sized company you can learn a lot from competitor or industry level conversations. Many businesses are using social text analytics as a way to slim down their focus group efforts. They’ll use text analytics to better understand high level consumer insights and then have more pointed focus group efforts. This can make your research investments much more efficient.
Customer Sentiment Analysis
Text analytics can make quick work of categorization of reviews whether you’re selling a handbag or a consumer app in the App Store. The manual alternative usually involves a spreadsheet and hours reading and categorizing reviews. Besides the pain of long hours to do this work, often we see inconsistencies due to the manual nature of this. Why not build a categorization and scoring model so that you can rerun the data daily/weekly/monthly?
Why We’re Fired Up About Text Analytics
Save Me Time = Save Me Money
Companies are using machine learning to automate this type of analysis and save person hours.
Supplement Human Judgement
Text analytics has the power to supplement human judgment and surface patterns in data. Companies are using machine learning to inform decision makers, not to replace them.
Value Creation Is Real
“Voice of” projects are being discussed at the highest level of organizations. These use cases are solid and the path to ROI is clear. This means that proof of concept projects are being integrated into repeatable business processes.
Where Things Are Going
Consumer Expectations Of Companies Keep Increasing
Text analytics can help your company respond better and faster.
The Tool Set Is Changing Quickly And Keeps Improving
If you haven’t seen some of the recent improvements in natural language processing, just google GPT-3 and see innovation applied across several industries.
Novel Data Sources
Ever wonder what an analysis of your team's messaging (ie slack) channels would look like? Yeah us too. Let’s do it.
Text Analytics For Human Resources
Look out for an upcoming post on those use cases. Everything from the annual survey, to regular COVID check-ins and town-hall meeting transcripts provide valuable source data to analyze and drive insights.
For CompassRed, we’ve been building out special tools to make text analysis even faster. We’re excited to share them with you in the upcoming days!
CompassRed is a full-service data agency that specializes in providing data strategy for clients across multiple industries.