Making the Business Case for Text Analytics

The key to making a business case for any Analytics initiative, not just text analytics, is to identify specific business problems and pain points and use analytics to address them, instead of merely seeking insights. Companies find themselves in a world where an increasing number of their customers are using social media, and the one thing, people LOVE doing on social media is talk (tweet/post/blog/whatever...) They talk about their experiences in dealing with the company and its services or products, about its competitors and about how they really feel. So, as a company, you have all this customer feedback out there, in the form of text, just waiting to be gathered. The risk company management faces, for not capturing this customer feedback, is just too great to ignore. They face the risk of looking bad (think PR nightmare) and losing their competitive advantage, if they do nothing about it, which brings me to the single most important use case driving text analytics in the enterprise today, which is, the compelling need for Social Media engagement and analytics.