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The technology exists to allow you to capture, evaluate and analyze everything that is being said about your company, everywhere it is being said. Your clients, customers, and potential customers are all communicating in various outlets. They are tweeting, blogging, emailing, calling your call center and sharing their thoughts and feelings in a way that works best for them and now you need to determine how to analyze what they are saying in a way that works best for you. All this information is there for you to harness, take hold of and make sense of so you can learn, grow and adjust to better meet the expectations of your target audience. There are a lot of solutions and service providers available to help you with your goals. Here are a few things to consider to get the best value for your investment and help you meet your business objectives.

1.    Do you want to try the solution before you buy it?

 
You may have a small project you want to test or a business-line within your business you want to run a few reports on. Down the road, these reports may lead to an opportunity to invest in a full-scale voice of the customer (VoC) strategy, but you need proof first. If this is the case for you, you should look for solution providers who are agile and don’t require you to buy everything up front. You’re still getting your feet wet so you should take advantage of providers who offer services on a report-by-report basis that may prove to you further investments are worth considering, but you don’t have to make that commitment right away.

2.    How extensive or robust do you actually need the solution to be?

 
Maybe you are ready to buy, but you don’t need a level of service suited for the NSA. Taking an honest look at your business goals and what you want to achieve with your VoC strategy, you need to determine if you even need to bring in an in-house solution. Look for solution providers who make it easy for you to start getting answers quickly and who offer support without making you buy an entire system that you need to run, manage and maintain on your own.

3.    Do you have the time, resources and talent to commit to maintaining an in-house solution?

 
Having software installed and having your staff trained seems simple enough, but the reality is it’s costly and sometimes ineffectual if you don’t have the right talent and resources in place. To get the most out of your software, you need system administration and optimization talent and up-to-date hardware. The investment keeps growing before you start to see any amount of ROI. To get really good granular results, you will need to be able to optimize the software, which will require deep expertise. Otherwise, you’ll be seeing a lot of ongoing maintenance costs and optimization issues down the road. Arguably, big data analytics is still very young and the field of talent to manage the technology and analysis is small and expensive to hold onto. Look for service providers who offer you as much or as little support you need and who have invested in the talent themselves. This way you will save money while having access to highly trained data scientists with a lot of training and experience.

 
The Value of Making Sense of Your Data

Your company will benefit from implementing a Text Analysis strategy you just need to know what solutions fit your business and your overall goals. With 80% of all data being unstructured and text based, there is inevitably going to be something in that data that will be of value to you. The technology exists to help you make sense of it and you need to know you don’t have to invest a lot of money to get to that value quickly.