Text Analytics for Business: Ignore it at Your Peril June 22, 2023 - Blogs on Text Analytics

In today’s digital age, businesses are generating vast amounts of text-based data every hour. This includes customer feedback, social media comments, employee comments, product reviews, internal emails, operation reports, incident reports, etc. Organizations have text data that can provide valuable insights but are they taking full advantage of this resource? Probably not. If not, they are missing an opportunity and leaving themselves at a competitive disadvantage. True, the huge volume of data can be overwhelming and seemingly difficult for companies to extract meaningful information from it. This is where text analytics comes in and where Provalis Research software QDA Miner and WordStat can help.

Text analytics is the process of extracting insights and information from unstructured textual data, using techniques like manual and computer-assisted coding, text mining, topic modeling and content analysis. By analyzing text data, businesses can gain insights into voice-of-the-customer, employee sentiment, market trends, brand analysis, sentiment, NPS comments related to score and more. Let’s look at a few of these concepts and explore how you can use text analytics to improve your business and get ahead of the competition.

Analyzing customer feedback can help businesses improve their products and services. Text analytics can be used to analyze customer surveys, online reviews, social media comments, and customer support tickets. By identifying common themes and sentiments in customer feedback, businesses can improve their products and services to better meet customer needs and expectations.

For example, let’s say you own a restaurant or a chain of restaurants, and you’ve been receiving negative feedback about your customer service. By using text analytics to analyze customer feedback, you may find that customers are frustrated with long wait times, poor food, or rude staff. You can identify the problem and which locations are most at risk or need the most help. By using this data, you can take steps to resolve these issues, such as hiring more staff or providing additional training to your employees.

Using text analytics software can help you do this in-house. You don’t have to pay large consulting fees. Your employees can be easily trained to collect, import the content, and do the analysis. You may also be able to centralize these efforts, thereby improving efficiency and reducing costs. This is exactly the case with several of our customers which you can see in these case studies.

See how specific techniques and examples of how you can use text analytics (QDA Miner/WordStat) for Survey Analysis, Sentiment Analysis, Voice of the Customer. These documents outline many of the features of the software and explain how it is best used in these different situations.

One of a company’s most important assets is its brand. By performing Brand Image Analysis, you can monitor your brand and compare it to your competitors. Through brand monitoring text analytics can assist businesses in monitoring mentions and discussions related to your brand and competitors’ brands across multiple platforms. By tracking customer sentiments, opinions, and trends, businesses can assess the perception of competitors’ brands, identify emerging brand-related issues, and benchmark their own brand performance against competitors.

 

Another important area where businesses usually have large volumes of text data is employee comments. It is often said that employees are your greatest resource and today it is more important than ever hire the right employees, retain, and engage them. It is as important as customer feedback. These comments can come from employee engagement surveys, exit interviews, emails, social media, to name a few.

For example, if you are a human resources manager, and you’ve noticed that your employees are feeling overworked and stressed. By using text analytics to analyze employee feedback, you may find several issues contributing to these problems. Perhaps your employees are struggling with work-life balance or feeling unsupported by management. Now you can take concrete steps to address these issues, such as implementing flexible work arrangements or providing additional support to your employees.

We share some insight into how to make the best use of this data in text analytics for human resources. This information can be used to improve employee engagement and morale, leading to increased productivity and retention. You can also build content analysis dictionaries to measure survey comments over time. This is true with tracking surveys for employees, customers, suppliers, etc. Text analytics can be used to automate content classification, making it easier to identify relevant data and extract insights. You can measure how topics and trends change from year-to-year, quarter-to-quarter. We have several videos that show you how to build and use content analysis dictionaries using WordStat.

Identifying market trends is critical to any business. Again, there are large volumes of text data that can be collected from news articles, social media, and other sources.

You may be a marketing manager, and have noticed, anecdotally, that your competitors are starting to focus on sustainability. By using text analytics to analyze news articles and social media posts, you can make a fact-based determination that sustainability is becoming a trend in your industry. Then you can take steps to incorporate sustainability into your marketing messaging and product development to stay ahead of the competition. One of the key resources may be social media. Using QDA Miner or WordStat you can directly collect social media data based on key words, themes, locations, and many other variables. The following resource gives you some ideas as to how you analyze social media data.

Another fruitful area for text analytics is not just looking at what’s happening now but trying to identify what’s next. One tactic is intellectual property analysis. Text analytics can be used to analyze patent filings, trademarks, copyright assessment, licensing and contracts, research papers, and technical documents to gain insights into competitors’ research and development activities, technological advancements, and potential future products. You can use scientometrics to explore scientific literature. IP analysis can help your company identify unique features, functionalities, methods, or design elements that can be protected by intellectual property rights. This helps you to differentiate your products from competitors and gain a competitive advantage in the market.

Similarly, incident reports related to the supply chain, manufacturing process, or warranty claims, can be analyzed to identify recurring issues and remedied quickly. For example, a car manufacturer by analyzing incident reports of warranty repairs can quickly identify a recurring problem that might be fixed through a change in the manufacturing process or design changes. Identifying it earlier may save money by foregoing a costly recall.

Key to any enterprise is a cost-effective and efficient supply chain. Text analytics can be used to monitor suppliers’ performance by analyzing emails, performance logs, to enable you to identify issues and negotiate proper terms. Your supply chain must be flexible and reactive to customer preferences and demand. Again, analyzing customers comments, emails, incident reports, can help you identify recurring problems and make your supply chain as responsive and efficient as possible. There have been many academic papers written on supply chain analysis using QDA Miner and WordStat.

A driving force in any business is its financials. You can use text data to analyze the competition to explore their quarterly and yearly financial reports. By leveraging the power of words, you can unlock the potential of textual data and gain a competitive advantage in your industry. You see how the competition is doing or perhaps identify a takeover candidate to enlarge or consolidate your business. The amount of text data can be overwhelming, and it can be hard to manually categorize this information. But you can use features in WordStat to download and analyze 10k and 10Q text data. A special routine enables users to import specific sections of 10-K and 10-Q financial filings, store them separately or merge them into single documents. The extraction routine automatically recognizes the company’s name, time period (quarter and year), and stores them as variables for easy analysis.

In conclusion, text analytics can provide businesses with valuable insights. Enable you to glean information to make data-driven decisions, improve products and services, and stay ahead of the competition. As we say in the title, Ignore it at Your Peril. The above are some practical examples and resources you can explore to see how you can make text analytics work for you. If you would like to know more or see how our software can help you please contact us for a consultation or a demo of our text analytics tools.