Natural Language Processing 101: Three Tips for Optimising Your Text Analytics Software

When it comes to experience programs, text analytics software has been revolutionising data interpretation since the capability arrived on the scene. I’m Siobhan May Jones, one of InMoment’s Customer Success Directors, and over my career, I’ve seen this transition up close.

One of my first jobs whilst studying at university was manually coding thousands of verbatims about pet food. While this was great financially because I got paid by the hour, it wasn’t a good use of time by today’s standards. Over the next five years, I worked in the market research industry and found that too many tasks are manual process-rich, as well as subject to human error. It has taken years of discipline to rewire my brain from manual work to working with experts and tools to achieve the right goal. 

Let me give you an example—let’s say you need to understand what customers are saying about your employees each month. Your goal is to track which employees you need to support, and which ones need to be celebrated. 

You have two options:

 1) Download a raw extract of the verbatim and read through it month by month, gain an understanding of what customers are saying, then talk to the team about it. 

 2) Use natural language processing tools to visualise where and why these comments are showing excellence or areas requiring improvement.

It’s not really a choice between these two options, as the first scenario has you spending hours clicking buttons and cleaning or filtering data, while the second forces you to make an action plan. 

So how can you optimise your text analytics software and, ultimately, strengthen your customer experience (CX) program? I have three tips for you:

Tip #1: Confirm You’re Using the Latest and Greatest Software 

Before taking any action with text analytics, we recommend chatting with experts in your field to make sure you have the latest tools, processes, software, and overall capability. Your text analytics software should have these four features:

Scalability

A solution that supports all of the countries and languages your customers work and buy in—at an acceptable level of quality and price.

Quality

Your text analytics solution must be able to surface important trends and patterns based on individual comments and the sentiments behind them.

Actionability

You need a layer of sophisticated analytics that can add tags and themes on a granular level, uncover sentiment, assign categories, identify intent, spot legal issues, and pick up on possible customer churn.

Speed

A solution with real-time analysis, reporting and action. This is specifically relevant when considering translations for global companies.

If your text analytics software is missing any of these features, you’ll be starting at a disadvantage. Here at InMoment, we’re constantly innovating based on clients’ specific needs to ensure we’re helping reduce processes and increase action. 

Tip #2: Keep Your Goal Front of Mind When Processing Customer Feedback

When you designed your customer experience program, you no doubt started with a goal in mind. And when it comes to processing thousands of unstructured pieces of customer feedback, it can be easy to lose sight of the original goal. 

We recommend being honest and clear with your team (and yourself) about what your primary goal is, then using the right approach for that goal. Are you looking to add qualitative information to bring life to your metrics, trying to understand what makes customers angry or frustrated, or are you looking to track a recent frontline training initiative and see if customers noticed enough to talk about it? 

Alternatively, are you looking to set up alerts based on topics (regardless of the many possible typos)? Text analytics is a powerful tool that will help you with any of the above goals.  

Tip #3: Be On The Lookout For New Updates

When it comes to text analytics software, there will always be new updates, new features, and new opportunities. We recommend adding a biannual calendar note to yourself to proactively identify how text analytics software is changing over time. By being open to change and by constantly onboarding new features, you have a real opportunity to stay ahead of the competition by keeping focus on continuous Experience Improvement (XI). 

For more information on text analytics, check out this eBook!

About Author

Siobhan May Jones Customer Success Director

As a Customer Success Director, Siobhan is responsible for ensuring her clients are successful in designing and executing world-class, tech-enabled CX (Customer Experience) and EX (Employee Experience) programs.

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