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Obtaining customer feedback and transforming this information into meaningful insights represents an ongoing problem for many business managers worldwide. However, text analytics offers a key piece of the data analysis puzzle, one that can help managers retrieve and assess customer feedback like never before. 

What Is Text Analytics?

Text analytics has generated interest from business managers at companies of all sizes, and perhaps for good reason. This service allows managers to retrieve customer feedback quickly and effortlessly and organize this information into large data sets. Thus, managers can use text analytics to collect customer feedback from across the web. 

In many instances, managers will leverage text analytics to obtain customer feedback from numerous online sources, including:

• Blog posts
• Social networks
• Web polls and surveys
• Websites

Although text analytics provides managers with a valuable service to retrieve customer feedback, it often fails to offer managers a fast, easy way to gain customer insights. 

For example, a manager may use text analytics to collect customer feedback from multiple online sources at once. He or she can utilize text analytics to organize this information into data sets and continue to retrieve customer feedback over the course of many days, months or years as well. 

In this scenario, a manager will be able to access a wealth of customer feedback. On the other hand, text analytics only provide customer data – not customer insights from the information – which means a manager will need to mine large data sets to understand customer behaviors and trends. 

Data mining can be costly and time-consuming, particularly for managers who lack extensive time and resources. Also, managers who are mining data sets for the first time may struggle to do so effectively. This likely will result in a massive time and resource investment, one that might fail to deliver a substantial return on investment (ROI). 

How Can Business Managers Overcome Text Analytics Challenges?

Many business managers may believe text analytics serves as an all-in-one solution to collect customer feedback and transform it into meaningful insights. Conversely, managers will need to complete data mining to maximize the value of the customer data provided via text analytics – something that could prove to be more trouble than it's worth. 

Fortunately, text analytics can provide significant value if it is used in conjunction with a top-of-the-line data analysis service – Self-Service Text Analysis.

Self-Service Text Analysis is a free, user-friendly service that allows managers to take the customer feedback that they receive via text analytics and transform this information into meaningful insights. It enables managers to produce comprehensive reports based on customer feedback, and as such, discover customer behaviors and trends that they may struggle to find elsewhere. 

With Self-Service Text Analysis, business managers can produce interactive PDF (iPDF) reports – assessments that feature charts, graphs and other superior visuals based on customer data obtained via text analytics – with ease.  

To create an interactive PDF (iPDF) report via Self-Service Text Analysis, a manager only needs to upload an Excel spreadsheet that contains user-generated content. This spreadsheet can include customer feedback from blog posts, websites and other online sources and will serve as the basis for the interactive PDF (iPDF) report. 

After a manager uploads an Excel spreadsheet via Self-Service Text Analysis, he or she will receive an interactive PDF (iPDF) report within about 15 minutes. This report will be sent digitally and arrive as an email, and as such, can easily be shared with managers in other departments as well. That way, managers across a business can work together to understand customer behaviors and trends and use the customer data that is available to make more informed decisions to drive their companies forward. 

Summary

Ultimately, text analytics can help business managers transform customer data into meaningful insights. For managers to accomplish this feat, they must understand that text analytics alone is insufficient. Instead, managers may want to consider the combination of text analytics and Self-Service Text Analysis to ensure they can access and evaluate customer feedback. Self-Service Text Analysis ensures managers can use customer feedback that they retrieve via text analytics to produce interactive PDF (iPDF) reports. Therefore, the combination of text analytics and Self-Service Text Analysis can provide tremendous value for managers who want to collect and assess meaningful customer insights any time they choose.