Text Mining for Customer Relationship Management

March 21, 2010

Text mining and text analytics used to be limited to just enterprise level business intelligence, enterprise search, security applications or biomedical research uses. It used to require highly technical dedicated resources and was out of reach for most businesses.

In recent years, however, text mining has infiltrated many other areas, including customer relationship management, customer experience management and direct marketing. For example, companies’ PR departments will constantly monitor customer chatter and feedback on the Internet, analyze the textual content in real time to identify customers’ sentiment trends and adjust the company’s marketing messages accordingly. Monitoring of customer sentiment will help surface major issues with the products and help capture valuable feedback (which again, have to be analyzed and mined, especially if the volume of feedback is very large) that can be used in product management process as well.

Text mining is important for customer feedback management because with the rise of social media, simple customer feedback forms or customer support forums are no longer adequate as reservoirs of customer feedback information. Much of the data is lying in the ether, among social media sites, product reviews forums, E-commerce sites, as well as in call centers and other customer touch points. The volume of data is so large that simple analytical tools are no longer adequate, and to make things even more complicated, most of the data is unstructured and has to be handled using text mining’s more sophisticated data manipulation and analysis capabilities.

Some companies offering such as text mining tools for these new uses are: Clarabridge, Overtone, Lexalytics and Attensity.

In the next blog, I will discuss more specifics around further growth opportunities for this area, for example, by integrating with product lifecycle management solutions to turn text mining from a discovery and analysis tool into a crucial component of the product design and innovation platform.

Do you know of any other text mining companies making headway into the Customer Relationship Management sector?

Chief Business Officer at UserTesting

Tien Anh joined UserTesting in 2015 after extensive financial and strategic experiences at OpenView, where he was an investor and advisor to a global portfolio of fast-growing enterprise SaaS companies. Until 2021, he led the Finance, IT, and Business Intelligence team as CFO of UserTesting. He currently leads initiatives for long term growth investments as Chief Business Officer at UserTesting.