Powered by advanced Natural Language Processing technology, new product allows retailers to discover key customer experience trends, issues and opportunities that are often hidden in open-ended customer feedback responses.
Toronto, Ontario, Canada – September 15, 2009 – Empathica Inc., a leading provider of Customer Experience Management (CEM) solutions to some of the world’s most respected brands, today announced Keyword Analysis Engine, a new product that converts unstructured customer comments into useful insights that companies can use to improve customer experiences. The product allows brands to easily stay in tune with customer concerns and identify emerging threats to their businesses that result from operational changes or new competitive pressures.
The solution uses Natural Language Processing technology to analyze, quantify and summarize customer feedback that companies capture in text format.
How the Keyword Analysis Engine Works
Retailers gather text-based customer comments from various sources, including text messages, open-ended survey questions and online comment forms. The Keyword Analysis Engine can analyze this information and produce underlying themes based on unique semantic detail dictionaries that Empathica created from working with over 100 leading multi-unit brands. The product has the ability to quantify these themes to determine fluctuations over time and emerging customer issues, and creates straightforward executive reports for all levels of an enterprise.
Keyword Analysis Engine solves a significant business problem. As many brands today engage customers across several media channels, the amount of incoming comments from customers can be overwhelming. Lacking the tools to quickly and easily analyze large volumes of text-based customer feedback, many retailers simply ignore the feedback altogether, while others engage in comment sampling that can subject brands to risky, uncoordinated actions.
With Keyword Analysis Engine, brands can systematically assess all inbound comments and organize these comments in one succinct place with analysis and insights that they can easily turn into actionable items. This powerful tool enables company leadership to discover key trends, detect emerging issues and uncover customer sentiments that could ultimately yield a competitive advantage and positively impact the company’s bottom line.
“Information overload is the biggest challenge for customer experience managers these days,” says Andrew Datars, VP of Product Management with Empathica. “It’s easy to capture customer feedback, but the hard part is transforming that raw feedback into actionable intelligence on how you can improve the customer experience. We know that multiple-choice surveys alone cannot always present a clear view of the cause and effect of customer dissatisfaction. Some of the best insights come from open-text comments from customers, and Keyword Analysis Engine is designed to make it easy to automatically mine those comments for business insights.”
Based on its long track record of success in helping retailers improve their customer experiences, Empathica has determined that customers’ comments can be a lead indicator of potential systemic problems, allowing retailers to identify location-level issues to be dealt with before they become problematic to the brand. While this has traditionally been an extremely time-consuming and labor-intensive task, Keyword Analysis Engine offers retailers the ability to do such analysis cost-effectively in a way that offers better results than other methods.
“Brands today are generally looking for ways to do more with less, while still engaging their customers across a wide array of channels,” says Sandra Tamburino, Senior Director of Marketing Science with Empathica. “Keyword Analysis Engine serves as an extremely useful solution to reduce the time spent gathering, retrieving and analyzing unstructured customer feedback. With all of these customer anecdotes compiled into a meaningful summary, brand leaders can spend less time figuring out what’s going on, and more time taking action to do something about it.”