How much of your business data is sitting around unused? You may have many ways to work with structured data, but your unstructured data gets overlooked due to the difficulty involved in the process. Relying on structured data alone means that open-ended comments and responses don’t factor into your reports and business goals. You could overlook opportunities, miss out on valuable customer feedback, and fall behind on optimizing the customer experience. Text mining fixes this problem through a variety of helpful capabilities that makes the most out of verbatim comments and other unstructured data.

Benefits of Text Mining

The importance of text mining can not be underestimated. Text mining delivers significant value to your business, as you’re better able to harness the insights that are hidden in your current and future data sets. Here are the benefits your company can realize by adopting text mining solutions, from coding to visualization.

Delve Into Your Unstructured Data

You don’t get a lot of value out of open-ended comments that are discarded due to a lack of processing power. Text mining empowers your organization to quantify this information. Rather than getting bits and pieces of the sentiment behind comments, you gain visibility.

Optimize the Experience

Without data from your open-ended feedback and other verbatim comments, you’re not able to fully optimize experiences for users, customers, clients, employees, and other stakeholders. While you can make some improvements based solely on structured data, you can better understand what stakeholders want and how they react to changes with text mining.

You don’t want to miss the mark with customer experience optimization, especially in competitive marketplaces. Keep your customer satisfaction high by fully understanding where they’re coming from, what they’re feeling, and what they want going forward.

Generate Reports Faster

Automated processing of many parts of the text analysis means that you don’t have to pour countless resources into the project. Coding, sentiment analysis, and other time-consuming parts of text mining get handled through the software itself, with the help of Natural Language Processing and other artificial intelligence tools.

Create Custom Views of Your Data

Cut through the signal to noise ratio by putting together custom dashboards with the most important information. Each person involved in the project can have their own view of the data to better inform their particular position. People who are not data scientists appreciate the useful visualizations and easy access to relevant data that’s provided in these types of dashboards.

Increase Productivity Through Automation

Manual, time-consuming processes can lead to employee disengagement, especially if you’re working with data scientists and other highly skilled data professionals. Not only is the productivity improved through a faster text mining method, but you also get better use out of your staff and their work hours.

Gain a Single Version of Data Truth Through Integration

Siloed data is an enemy to accurate data and reporting. If your unstructured data is spread throughout multiple platforms, machines, spreadsheets, and other files, then it’s possible that people are working on different versions of that information. Text mining tools that have native integration for pulling data sources into the platform, as well as those with APIs that make it simple to work with your sources, consolidate all of this information in one place. You won’t have version control issues and decreased data quality concerns.

Automating Translations

Global companies may receive feedback in multiple languages. If you manually translate these verbatim comments, then you’re adding a lot of time to the process. Text mining tools can automate the translations and have the capability to understand multi-lingual sentiments.

How Text Mining Improves Decision Making

Rather than guessing at why your audience picked the scores that they did on a survey, you can evaluate their verbatim comments to open-ended questions.

Sometimes your audience will surprise you with unexpected use cases and feedback. This will help you identify new opportunities and markets, as well as better serve your customers and other stakeholders.

If you roll out a new product, service, or campaign and there are problems with it, customer feedback also helps you speed up your reaction time to these issues. This benefit also allows you to make fast decisions when you’re running tests or putting new initiatives in place.

Data-driven decision making is essential for getting buy-in in organizations. When you can point to hard data that backs up the need for improvements, changes, and other initiatives, you’re better able to make your case with your bosses.

Examples of Text Mining

Text mining comes in many forms, depending on your business needs. It’s a flexible technology that adapts to your goals in the short and long-term. You may use one or more sources for unstructured data, which will now deliver many insights that were previously inaccessible due to the difficulty of manually processing this information. Some text mining solutions also work with structured data so you can perform both types of analysis within the same software. Here are examples of tests, surveys, and other research that benefit from text mining technology.

  • Net Promoter Score®
  • Advertising campaign tests
  • Voice of the customer
  • Ad creatives tests
  • Concept testing
  • Satisfaction testing of customers, employees, clients, patients, and others
  • Survey and social media comments
  • Customer support logs
  • Trouble tickets

Text mining these unstructured data sources is helpful in many parts of your organization. With companies becoming focused on the customer experience and employee engagement, sentiment analysis becomes a necessary part of your critical business infrastructure.

Continual improvement is what sets companies apart from one another in the modern business world, and it’s difficult to achieve that without considering open-ended survey responses.

Make the most out of your company’s data and achieve the competitive edge that’s needed to take you through 2020 and beyond. Incorporate text mining software into your analysis workflow and enjoy the power and flexibility it delivers.

Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.