My guest for this week’s Innovators show is Seth Grimes. He’s a business intelligence expert who, nowadays, is really keen on text analytics. In this conversation he explains why: There’s suddenly a lot more text available for analysis.
And it’s not simply because the web continues to grow. The conversational dimension of the web — blogging, and now microblogging — holds particular interest for companies that need to monitor, and make sense of, what is being said about them online.
Seth uses the wonderful phrase “voice of the customer” to describe this new opportunity. As people increasingly narrate their lives and experiences online, that voice becomes easier to hear — or anyway, to read.
Couple that with “voice of the company” applications, exemplified by Public Service of New Hampshire’s use of Twitter during the December ice storm, and maybe we can begin to restore a market dynamic in which these two complementary voices can hear — and respond to — one another.
this reminded me of another blog this week, where the back and forth between customers is dubbed “Social CRM”. i first heard it from the Redmonk guys, they referenced… http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/03/22/the-future-of-twitter-social-crm/
i like “Voice of the Customer” because “Social CRM” seems to imply that somehow companies are required to “manage” this.