Surveys fascinate me. They're a great way to interact with people who want to be heard, despite all the drawbacks about inadequate sample size, self-selection, etc. You can get solid evidence, or at least bits of evidence to spark ideas. But slogging through page after page of comments, looking for a gem of an insight, trend, or idea, is time-consuming and difficult to manage. (This is like digging through public comments on proposed government regulations, which is what I analyzed for my PhD dissertation.)
The Attensity Group is doing something with text analytics that sounds like it could provide valuable evidence for product managers and marketers. Its technology helps make sense of responses by analyzing open-ended customer feedback survey questions known as 'verbatims'. (KM World covered this in And the survey really said.)
According to Attensity, its "award-winning Voice of the Customer application uses semantic analysis to mine the unstructured responses in customer feedback. It combines structured information from surveys with unstructured verbatims to get to the root cause of given scores, identify warning signs and 'cries for help,' and help you take appropriate actions to mitigate issues and ensure customer satisfaction." It can help you "better understand customer sentiment, satisfaction, loyalty and potential product or service issues." The service combines the company's text analysis engine with its patented Exhaustive Extraction technology: "Attensity VoC Survey Advantage automatically identifies facts, opinions, requests, trends and trouble spots from unstructured text and transforms the data into structured, actionable intelligence." If they can do that, it sounds like a good way to support evidence-based decision-making.
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