An Untapped Opportunity for Gaining Customer Insight

Marketing analytics professionals are certainly aware that the strength of their analyses and the accuracy of their predictions are linked to the quality of the input data.

Fortunately, businesses that want to compete with analytics have invested heavily in new information technology to improve the collection of marketing and customer data. In addition, the proliferation of third-party data providers, ranging from collaborative databases to online panels has helped augment our understanding of consumers and expand the types of actionable insights we can offer our clients. This is indeed progress.

However, the purpose of this blog entry is to encourage companies as well as the marketing analytics community to continue to search for new sources of business and customer information.

In my opinion, one source of untapped insights rests quietly, waiting to be awoken. That is the voluminous information that resides in businesses and stored in unstructured data repositories. This could be customer comments collected at a call center, sales and service inquiries received via email or even consumer feedback provided through social networks.

The common thread with all of these information sources is that it requires interpretation of unstructured text. This is an extra twist that explains why these information sources are commonly under leveraged. Analyzing structured, categorized data is certainly easier than unstructured data.
However, I choose to view this added complexity as a new hurdle and not an impassable obstacle.

Statistical software providers such as SAS and SPSS have developed sophisticated text mining tools that are designed to accept and help interpret free form, unstructured data types. Analysts can customize these tools to search and identify patterns of keywords that are unique and meaningful to their business. This process can be used to consistently categorize the unstructured data into unique and actionable dimensions such as: customer satisfaction and tone, product interests and needs, awareness of competitive offerings, urgency of request and so on.

This is when the benefit can be realized. Once the data is converted into a structured format it can become a new ongoing information source used to guide targeted business strategies and marketing programs.

It’s time to go wake up those dormant data sources.

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Posted by on 05/11/2009 12:48 PM

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