DON’T DROWN IN VERBATIM DATA!

Nowadays we are collecting more and more feedback from our customers in the form of unstructured data, whether this is from survey verbatim comments, social media comments, emails, or telephone transcripts.

However, collecting unstructured data is one thing, but knowing what to do with it is another. To take a customer centric approach, you absolutely must read the feedback. I love reading the feedback and I would always advocate that you do, it is hugely insightful, but one simply can’t read 10s of 1,000s of verbatim comments.

At a tactical level, closed loop feedback programs will allow you to act on isolated cases, but taking a more strategic approach requires the efficient and timely identification of common themes and the root cause of any fiction points for the business to act on.

Cross analysing with quantitative data can help you achieve this by providing context and narrowing the data down to very specific pockets of customers, so that the verbatim comments are naturally grouped and are of a manageable volume to read and draw insights from.  Yet this data is not always available, particularly in short CX surveys.

Manual coding can also help, so long as you are prepared to invest in the expertise for quality coding that encapsulates the three layers of category, sub-category and sentiment. However, while this is very good at identifying key themes in the data and the symptoms of any friction points, it is less efficient at getting to the root cause.

That’s where we come to automated text analytics.  I must admit I wasn’t completely sold on this approach until I came across Touchpoint Group’s IpiphanyTM Cognitive Analytics tool.  This tool goes beyond traditional text analytics and data mining tools. Using proprietary i3 Technology to apply natural language understanding, machine learning and cognitive computing to analyse data from disparate sources (including quantitative data) this is extremely powerful at discovering key issues, opportunities and root causes.

That is why I have partnered with Touchpoint Group, to have access to IpiphanyTM and offer my clients the best in class analysis of their verbatim data.