Title: Accuracy Matters — Key Considerations for Choosing a Text Analytics Solution
Who: Dr. David Bean, PhD Former Attensity CTO and Founder, and Professor of Linguistics
When: OnDemand, at your convenience
Cost: Complimentary with Registration

Join Attensity co-founder and linguistics pioneer Dr. David Bean, PhD, for this  Voice of Customer Text Analytics 101 featuring real world use cases of text analytics solutions in action, get text analytics explained and learn the key considerations for evaluating a solutions, including:

* Statistical/keyword vs. a linguistics approach – why does it matter?
* How to capture customer insights you DON’T know to look for
* The business value of conceptual findings vs. granular factual findings
* How should slang and abbreviations be addressed?

Not all text analytics solutions are created equal. How do you know if yours is working and accurate? Join us for this informative, free webinar for tips to evaluate if your organization getting the full advantage of these technology advancements

Please provide the following information and we’ll reply with access to the event.

When: Available On-Demand

Do you know why banking customers churn? The reasons may surprise you! Which provider has a reputation for the longest lines and who has the best/worst customer service? Don’t miss this opportunity to see Attensity’s new Retail Banking Solution and learn how you can use text analytics to answer these questions for your industry, as well as:

• Identify the real reasons customers churn
• Analyze customer sentiment around brands, offerings, services and more
• Measure campaign feedback to accurately forecast demand
• Detect early warning of potential issues before they become problems
• Respond to customer requests for help with offerings and services

Check out this recorded event to see how you can harness the power of text analytics to understand the voice of your customers and to learn what they will do next.

Sentiment is a widely discussed topic in the social, market and customer analytics world.  Most vendors and buyers talk about sentiment as the “holy grail” and extremely difficult to get right. Attensity has been doing sentiment analysis for years and offers a very accurate view of sentiment (over 95% in some cases) due to our patented Exhaustive Extraction^TM approach,  BUT what we have found when working with our customers is that sentiment really DOESN’T MATTER if you can’t connect a why to it.  Why is a customer really upset or very satisfied? 

About 4 years ago a very senior executive in customer service in a large technology company called me personally and asked me to give him a demo of Attensity.  At the time, his company’s Net Promoter ^TM score had made a large decline and the entire executive staff were pointing the finger at him and his team.  He was furious and a bit afraid. What was going on?  Was it really the recent outsourcing of part of the customer service department to an overseas group that was at the root of the issue? They had been getting complaints about accents for a while now. 

So we took the verbatim text in their customer satisfaction surveys and also looked across social media and we found something completely different than what they expected. Yes, there was negative sentiment (just like the surveys scores indicated), but it became very clear, very quickly that the latest version of their product, while a breakthrough new release, was also extremely problematic.  The product works on the background of any personal computer (PC) and the new product, while functionally superior, had huge performance problems.  Every customer that complained, always mentioned the huge performance latency they were experiencing after they installed the new version.  The technology company ultimately reorganized their development and QA groups and created a performance center of excellence. In just a few months after getting this insight, they completely overhauled the new product to improve performance, and immediately rolled-it -out to their customer base. As the improved version penetrated the market, they experienced significant improvements in satisfaction and their sentiment across channels improved greatly. 

In this case, as with so many others, the WHY behind the sentiment was so critical to their business. Being able to both understand the sentiment and more importantly, being able to impact the sentiment in a positive direction was what impacted their customer’s satisfaction and ultimately retention. It also drove them to focus in the right place. While the blame initially fell on customer service, the action that impacted sentiment the most was with the product itself.  Below are a few more examples where the WHY behind the sentiment, made all of the difference to the business:

1) Product Defect Identification- one of the largest and more well known consumer technology companies launched a new version of a popular product last year. The sentiment online was trending negative, but why? They realized quickly with Attensity that a product defect (that affected earlier versions of the product) was affecting this version too. They fixed it before wide-scale roll-out and the sentiment changed immediately. The new product was a raving success!

2) Prioritized Improvement Areas - one of the world’s largest hotel chains uses Attensity to identify at the property-level what is driving poor satisfaction and negative sentiment online.  By looking at hotel surveys, Trip Advisor and a myriad of other social sites, Attensity provides to them a daily, prioritized list of the top things they can do at the specific property to make improvements that directly impact the customer and their feedback.

3) Why Your Competition is Killing You – another Attensity consumer technology customer had started to fall behind when it came to market-share against some of its biggest competitors.  Market opinion and buzz about them, compared to their competition on key initiatives that all companies in their space were taking was negative. But when they just looked at sentiment it seemed like across the board they were perceived negatively – when in fact, that wasn’t true. With Attensity, they were able to see exactly why they weren’t being recognized as a leader in the specific area. They used this insight to change their marketing and even products and product naming to better meet market demand and perception! Sentiment and sales improved.

4) How to Fix Your Website/Online Content – a large financial institution had some of the most significantly negative sentiment about their website in social media – more so than any other comparable retail bank.  With Attensity they could understand exactly what about their online banking services, web content and even Facebook presence bothered customers so much. They made changes and the sentiment tides are changing!

5) Which Customers To Spend More Time & Money On – grumpiness is not created equally.  While some people are excellent at being grumpy (I know too many of these people) they might not be the people as a business that you should invest a lot of money on to make them happy, while others you absolutely should. One large telecommunications provider not only looked for customers with extremely negative sentiment, but also used Attensity to determine who these customers were and how much influence they had when they spoke out negatively.  This helped the business prioritize who, how and what they responded to grumpy customer with and allowed them to both leverage their internal resources better and to focus on the customers that were the most influential.

Do you have any examples you can share about the why behind your customer’s sentiment?

Photo Credit: alshepmcr

I’ve been talking to analysts and press in the last few weeks about our new release Attensity Analyze 6.0 and so many of them have said back to me that they think this release is a real breakthrough in BI – so I wanted to share with you what they said are the top reasons. In our briefings, we’ve talked about putting the ability to do everything from conduct in-depth data exploration, to develop reports and full-fledged, multi-tabbed dashboards into the hands of the business user without requiring a technical user, without requiring extensive set-up (others require you to create classification lists and to have BI experts in-house to create reports) and the reactions have been great.  “Beauty Meets Brains” is our metaphor – but it’s not only easy to look at, it is easy to create, understand and share.  The brains part comes into play with our extensions to our patented technology – Exhaustive Extraction^TM  and to our core engines. So this is a bit of a shameless plug -  BUT worth reading on….

Here are the top reasons others have told me this release is a revolutionary step in not only text analytics, but in BI in general.

1) Pre-built meta-data layer – What’s in this data? How can I query it easily and fast? This release comes with a full-fledged meta-data layer. To us that means a layer that provides a descriptive view of what data is (or is about to be) in Attensity. This makes both set-up and query 10x easier. Load up your data and Attensity creates the meta-data layer automatically. The release includes a meta-data layer is both generic to any industry, as well as industry specific.  Below is a snippet of the banking industry layer….

2) Out of the Box (OOB) Analytics, Reports & Dashboards – with over 100 out of the box analytics, reports and dashboards including sentiment, issues, intent (churn, buy, recommend), suggestions, profiling, competitive intelligence, hot spots and more this release makes getting started fast and easy.  When we show examples of these reports and the easy to use wizard that enables users to create them many had an “ah ha” moment.  The wizard, enabled by out of the box choices for everything from chart types to filter options (e.g., I want to look at customer conversations by segment, channel, demographic, time, geo, etc.) to more advanced analytics like hot spotting and multi-dimensional comparative Pareto charts, is something, literally, anyone can use.  Here’s a peak at one of the steps in the wizard – it shows a few of the many choices of OOB reports.

3) Native Data Sources - half the battle in an analytics implementation is getting the data into the application and having a system to get it in, on an on-going basis. With this release we continue to offer native data sources – over 75+million online and social media sources across languages, native ingestion tools to automatically bring in survey responses, emails, CRM data, repair data and even to access and fuse structured data in all of these sources with the unstructured data we capture. This release adds a streamlined workflow, improved scheduling and management of these sources.

4) Big Data Analytics - building off of the Attensity Data Grid release from January of this year, Attensity Analyze 6.0 continues to take scale to a new level. With the TIDAL WAVE of customer data that is upon us, fueled by social media, having this product backed by a data grid that enables rapid expansion of resources to analyze all customer conversations is an asset like no other.

5) Integrated Business Process - as the only vendor in the text analytics space that has connected ACTION to insight, this release furthers that by enabling users to define their engagement actions into business rules based on data insights found. Not only can the system understand what’s in the data, but it can alert, route, queue, enable response and track all interactions.

6) (last but not least) Major Advances in NLP – It wouldn’t be an Attensity release without our continued investment in providing the MOST ACCURATE and ACTIONABLE text analytics on the market. We continued to push our linguists to natively add to our product industry leading language understanding.  Some highlights include: smart phrases, idiom handling, hierarchical concept understanding, request/command/suggestion identification, locative pronouns and many others that are so geeky that including them here might give away some of our secrets .

After six years at Attensity, it is an absolute thrill to get to show off this latest version of our product, particularly to so much interest and excitement.  Not only have we taken text analytics to the next level – but I believe what we’ve done in terms of easy analytics/reporting, scale, meta-data understanding and connection to REAL action is breakthrough for BI in general.

Let me know if you want to check it out….or sign-up for an up-coming webinar that features the product.

Photo Credit: by Liam Higgins