The customer experience (CX) represents more than just an interaction with a customer; in fact, this connection encompasses many customer emotions that can be difficult for a business to assess. In the past, a company may have leveraged traditional market research to capture its customers' emotions. With customer polls, surveys and other conventional research, a company may have been able to gain basic insights into how customers think and feel about its offerings. However, these insights rarely, if ever, can be simple to obtain and often require extensive man-hours and resources to evaluate.Consider an online survey that a company may distribute to its customers. A business first must develop the survey itself, putting together a series of open- and closed-ended questions it can use to learn from its customers. Next, the survey must be sent out to the right audience, and a company will await customer responses. And after a business gets these responses, it will need to organize the survey data and review it to gain actionable insights into customer' thoughts and feeling about its offerings. Conducting a survey and evaluating its results may require many man-hours, along with a significant financial investment. And after the survey is completed, there is no guarantee a business will be able to use the data at its disposal to learn about its customers and make more informed decisions to boost its CX levels. Even the most resource-intensive CX measurement programs fail to quantify for customer emotions, according to Forrester Research Senior Analyst Maxie Schmidt-Subramanian. Instead, these programs commonly focus on "rational or cognitive evaluate of (customer) experiences," Schmidt-Subramanian noted. "Measuring emotions — and making sense of all of the tools and methods that claim to do just that — is hard," Schmidt-Subramanian wrote in a blog post. "What's more, a deep-seated skepticism about the trustworthiness of emotion measurement prevails in organizations — making it harder to get buy-in for emotion metrics." Fortunately, text analytics empowers a business to understand why customers think and feel a particular way about its products and services. Text analytics offers substantial value for a number of reasons, including: 1. Actionable insights Text analytics offers real-time, up-to-the-minute insights into customers. It enables a company to find out what its customers are saying about its products and services on social networks, websites and other online forums instantly and use this information to make more informed CX decisions. The customer insights available from text analytics also may help a business revamp its market research. Rather than committing its resources to traditional market research, a company may be able to save both time and money and enjoy superb customer insights with text analytics. 2. In-depth data Traditional market research may have provided a glimpse into how customers responded to a business' offerings. But now, text analytics ensures a company can take its customer analysis to new heights. Text analytics provides in-depth customer data, allowing a company to learn about its own customers as well as its rivals'. It empowers a company to conduct in-depth analysis into customer feedback and retrieve information it can use to foster long-lasting customer relationships. 3. Faster, more effective CX improvements Improving CX remains an ongoing priority for many businesses, and text analytics can move a company one step closer toward achieving its CX goals. With text analytics, a company can access interactive PDFs (iPDFs), comprehensive, easy-to-understand reports that highlight various customer data. Interactive PDFs (iPDFs) empower a business to make faster, more effective CX decisions based on customer insights, thus enabling a company to discover new ways to better respond to its customers' needs consistently. Enhance CX consistently with Self-Service Text Analysis Thanks to Self-Service Text Analysis, a business can access an interactive PDF (iPDF) that highlights customer data and trends in just minutes. Self-Service Text Analysis provides a free tool for business of all sizes, empowering companies to eliminate the complexity commonly associated with text analytics. As a result, Self-Service Text Analytics offers outstanding value for both small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprises alike. Summary Understanding why customers feel positively, negatively or neutrally toward a company's offerings can be exceedingly difficult. But with text analytics, a business can revamp its CX efforts based on actionable customer feedback. Text analytics offers customer insights that may be nearly impossible to obtain elsewhere. As such, text analytics serves as a promising technology that can help a business better connect with customers, both now and in the future.