Looking for some help in evaluating customer experience management solution providers? The landscape can be crowded and confusing, with different vendors offering varying approaches to the market. To help sort things out, Technology Evaluation Centers helps companies research, evaluate, and select the best enterprise software solutions for their unique business requirements. According to the TEC web site, TEC’s proven approach combines:

• Extensive online IT research, including knowledge bases that catalog vendors’ support for thousands of enterprise software features and functions;
• A proven software selection methodology, refined over hundreds of selection projects;
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• The expertise of analysts and software selection experts.

TEC recently covered Attensity in an independent review of our CEM suite. Here is an excerpt from the resulting report, titled A Product Note: Attensity and the Voice of the Customer:

“Attensity has found a way to truly capture the voice of the customer with its new breed of customer experience management (CEM) solutions. TEC analyst Jorge García looks at how Attensity’s CEM products can help organizations analyze customer conversations across multiple channels, extract actionable data and insights, and route conversations for rapid and effective response, improving their customers’ experience and loyalty.”

Click here to read the full report. Registration is required but free.

The results are in from Attensity’s analysis of the Yahoo! and ABC News GOP debate held on Saturday night in New Hampshire. Yahoo! news editor Phoebe Connelly published a summary of the results of Attensity’s analysis in a blog post titled Yahoo! readers still unsure about Romney as frontrunner.

During the course of the debate, Attensity teamed with Yahoo! to deliver Voice of the Voter real-time social media analytics on the Yahoo! web site, which monitored and analyzed social media conversations about the candidates and issues, and delivered live, dynamic reports to the Yahoo! elections web page. The reports included sentiment scores for each candidate, and ratings on the candidate’s performance on key issues such as the economy, defense, healthcare and foreign policy.

Throughout the debate, plus another 30 mins before and after the debate, Attensity categorized over 38,000 tweets in terms of hits/misses across all the candidates. Below are the details of the sentiment analysis Attensity performed:

MITT ROMNEY – seemingly more miss than hit. However, a good chunk of the negative feedback  (upwards of 30%) was tied to Romney’s poor record on job creation. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Democrats led this twitter campaign with @TheDemocrats being the most retweeted:

“RT @TheDemocrats: FACT: Gov. Romney had one of the worst job-creation records in the country MA ranked 47th in job creation. http://t.co/tqAzqEoh #NHdebate”.

@TheDemocrats were also exclusive in homing in on foreign policy weakness:

“RT @TheDemocrats: Mitt Romney flip-flopped on Iraq. Full fact-check: http://t.co/zO03AU9R #NHdebate”.

RICK PERRY – Most of the negative sentiment related to foreign policy particular with respect to Perry’s comments about Iraq:

“RT @laurenist: Out drinking. Check in on Twitter. Rick Perry wants to reinvade Iraq. Continue drinking.”

RON PAUL – Seemed to do well.  Has a tendency to make “unspeakable” or taboo statements but such comments do not always result in polarized sentiment. The following was quite heavily retweeted but minimal sentiment was subsequently generated:

“RT @AriBerman: Ron Paul: “how many times have you seen a rich white person get the electric chair?”

Paul talked about Martin Luther King being one of his heroes, which resulted in mass “curiosity”.

Using Attensity, it is very easy to get at relationships in text like public perceptions that certain candidates may have slammed other candidates. For example, Ron Paul supporters felt that he hammered Santorum particularly on “debt”. Paul’s dress code also consistently gets picked on in these debates, and there was additional skepticism for Paul among female detractors:

“RT @emilyslist: Ron Paul seems to be pro-right to privacy unless you’re talking about women’s health… #nhdebate”.

We do not show non-sentiment or neutral topics here, but the microphone issue that Ron experienced did result in high traffic.

RICK SANTORUM – Santorum’s comments on “no classes in America” generated a lot of commentary. Again, even though we visually do not show retweets (over 800 retweets), it did result in some negative sentiment.  The more astute attendees pointed out that, on his website, Rick stated he was all about helping the middle class:

“RT @Slate: RT @buzzfeedben: Headline on Santorum website: “Santorum hopes to rebuild middle class” http://t.co/uekiNXIP #classwarwar”.

No surprise that Santorum’s stance on gay marriage led to a huge spike in negative sentiment, some of it humorous:

“RT @billyeichner: You’ll appreciate Rick Santorum more once you realize he’s being played by Glenn Close”.

Rick was somewhat deft in using Paul’s microphone malfunction to his advantage:

“Santorum Zings Ron Paul Over Mic Trouble: ‘It Caught You Not Telling The Truth’ http://t.co/z7lkpEDr”.

Overall, Santorum’s supporters felt he gave Ron Paul a good run for this money.

JON HUNTSMAN – His promoters appreciated how Huntsman was more focused on New Hampshire than the other candidates.  The Washington Post pushed his job-creation successes:

“RT @washingtonpost: Why would Huntsman be better? Says his state was No. 1 in job creation, not No. 47 like Mass. (ouch, Mitt!) #NHDebate”.

Huntsman speaking in Chinese resulted in massive traffic, which was mostly not sentiment-based in nature.  However, for many Republicans, he lost the game right there:

“RT @Lawrence: Huntsman just lost the China debate for Repub audience. Of course Romney got applause for nonsense.”

NEWT GINGRICH – Gingrich still seems to have a “crazy uncle” image among detractors. The first clue was a spike in “yellow shirt” mentions with commenters playfully wondering:

“is newt gingrich’s shirt yellow or just REALLY dirty? Doesn’t matter, the next time I suit up (which happends once a year) yellow it is!”

Talking about the “sanctity of marriage” was always going to be a slippery slope for Gingrich, given that this topic received a lot of negative sentiment during the last debate. Curiously, the biggest hit for Gingrich was his articulation of media bias.

“RT @KLSouth: –> RT @brentbozell: Gingrich just STOMPED the left-wing press, and showed their sheer hypocrisy. Standing ovation. #nhd …”

And finally, the Sheldon Adelson news, which was mass tweeted, was timely, one of the first initial hits as the debate got into the early stages:

“RT  @chucktodd: .@RalstonFlash just reported Vegas mogul Sheldon Adelson has written a $5M check to the Gingrich SuperPAC. GameOn”

Interested in how we got these results? Email us at sales@attensity.com.

Giving viewers a voice in the Republican presidential debate

Attensity is excited to be teaming up with Yahoo!, the premier digital media company, to provide millions of viewers a voice in the upcoming ABC News debate to be held on Saturday, January 7^th at 9pm EST/6pm PST in New Hampshire.

During the course of the debate, Attensity’s Voice of the Voter real-time socialmedia analytics will monitor and analyze social media conversations about the candidates and issues, and deliver live, dynamic reports to the Yahoo! elections web site at http://news.yahoo.com/elections/debate/. The reports will include sentiment scores for each candidate, and ratings on the candidate’s performance on key issues such as the economy, defense, healthcare and foreign policy.

Below is an example of the kind of analysis that will be available LIVE during the debate this Saturday…

Happy New Year!

As we kick off 2012, we wanted to take some time to reflect on the biggest trends that shaped the market for Customer Experience Management in 2011, and make a few predictions for the coming year. Here are some of our thoughts and observations, based on Attensity’s work with our customers – some of the world’s leading brands and innovators in customer experience – as well as conversations with industry analysts, thought leaders and partners, in 2011:

2011 Trends:

(1) Big Data cast a big shadow. Big Data created by the explosion in social media users is driving the need for social analytics (including text analytics). Comments from the 800M users on Facebook cross large organizations on a daily basis, not to mention the 230M+ tweets sent every day, with over 20 percent of these tweets concerning products and services. Text analytics has been around for years, but this explosion of Big Data is forcing enterprise organizations to look for ways to analyze and get insights from social customer conversations. Even though 2011 saw significant inroads in their ability to mine social media (such as Attensity’s Facebook Analytics Module), there remain challenges.

(2) Social media drove a convergence of customer service with marketing. Social media was originally driven by marketing departments, but companies found that the questions generated In social media required input from the customer service organization. In 2011, market demand evolved from social listening/monitoring to social analytics, to address the need for more useful, deeper insights from social conversation data. Organizations began moving from experimenting with social media to getting real business value from their social initiatives by tying them to business processes in marketing, sales and customer service. For that reason, the worldwide Social CRM market is estimated to reach over $1Bn in revenue by year-end 2012, up from ~$625M in 2010.

2012 Predictions:

(1) Social analytics in real-time will become the new standard for success. In 2012, text analytics and CEM tools will be sharpened to specifically target certain industries and time-sensitive events. Attensity found its solutions to be adopted in 2011 in industries ranging from financial services and hospitality to telecommunications, consumer electronics and IT, but there still remain industries that have barely tapped into the social stream. Across the board, the demand for real-time social analytics on timely events and topics like marketing campaigns, product launches, emerging issues and news events (such as the ongoing election and debates) is going to become the new standard for success. Those who can analyze social customer sentiment in real-time — and share that information the fastest — will win.

(2) Social engagement will move from specialized social teams to business users throughout the enterprise. Customer issues and opportunities appear and spike very quickly in social media. Enterprise organizations must find ways to address this by integrating social media into their customer interaction processes. They are looking for solutions that combine social engagement with workflow and business process rules, alerting and routing. Attensity is seeing its social analytics platforms deployed across as many as 20 groups within the enterprise.

(3) Companies will implement multi-channel tools that integrate social analysis with other enterprise systems. There is an increasing demand among large, global, organizations for text analytics solutions capable of analyzing multi-lingual customer conversation data from millions of sources, while integrating with other systems (BI, CRM, etc). Big Data is predicted by analysts to be the next “must have” competency in 2012 as the volume of digital content grows to 2.7 zettabytes, up 48% from 2011. Over 90% of this information will be unstructured (e.g., images, videos, MP3 files, and files based on social media and web-enabled workloads) – full of rich information, but challenging to understand and analyze.

These are just a few of our thoughts, but we’d love to get your ideas too! Write to us in the Comments section and let us know: which big trends do you think will shape the customer experience in the coming year?

No, I haven’t become the official Attensity blogger on consumer electronics, but I am a shopper and this season the extensive list of new consumer electronics products and advertising to go with them is kind of overwhelming.  Once I made the decision that we are going to attempt to read our books on a tablet versus in the warm and cozy real-book style, I started to look for the perfect reader.  I already read the Wall Street Journal every day on my husband’s iPad2 and so far it’s been a pretty good experience, but I find iTunes to be challenging to use across computers and it seems as if the new version is extra sensitive to piracy, making burning movies and songs that I have on DVD even harder to transfer and I fear making book download a pain too.

Anyway, Jane Lynch’s catchy and sometimes annoying commercial devotion to the Barnes and Noble Nook made me look at the two “book seller” products – the Nook and the Kindle.

This post mostly focuses on the Kindle.  With this latest version of the Kindle – the Kindle Fire, Amazon pushed it to the limits.  Some of my likes for the product: Android OS – giving us access to lots of games (unlike the Nook which has a proprietary OS), easy-as-pie access to the Amazon store (about the only thing usability wise that is simple) and the price.  One blogger noted that it is priced under cost, but that after the consumer purchases 3-4 full priced books Amazon makes their money back.  Some of my dislikes for the product: Usability (as I already alluded to) is challenging and there is pretty-much no privacy (if my husband or kid picks it up, they get access to exactly what I was looking at, even if I just finished surfing for a gift for them and forgot to close the browser).

While many reviewers have been negative to neutral (versus really positive) about the product, the general social view is neutral to positive.  There have been some complaints about the Kindle that have shown up in user forums that seem to be the root of the minor negative sentiment, but overall the primary discussion is focused on the software upgrade that Amazon announced after the initial product reviews came out online to improve some of the complaints about privacy/security. (see the word cloud below.)

When I do take a quick look at the negative comments, most of them seem to be from Apple lovers who got a Kindle as a gift and are grumpy about it or just want some of their Apple features included!

Those who are positive are excited to have received it as a gift and love the fact that they get access to all of the apps in the Android store.  That is what is attracting me to the device (versus say a Nook or Apple which requires me to use iTunes.)

So, I guess the jury is still out. While Apple has made one of the most elegant tablets in the market, it is expensive and so even though we have one, I have to share it with my husband. I think I am going to stick with my cozy book for now and wait for the elusive Kindle software upgrade to get the reader!

Photo Credit: All rights reserved by tawatchaifr