How to Use Sentiment Analysis to Gain a Competitive Advantage

Transcription

1 CASE STUDY How to Use Sentiment Analysis to Gain a Competitive Advantage Indellient s Clarity project strengthens IBM s offerings using real-time feedback of their product and services

2 Abstract The most valuable consumer feedback is found in the conversations happening outside of your organization s walls. These conversations are not prompted by you, but are happening across social media platforms, forums, review sites and more. Understanding the voice of the customer (VOC) and what they are saying about your brand provides an incredible advantage in understanding your customer s needs. An advanced sentiment analysis solution to identify and categorize opinions at scale can accomplish just that. Sentiment analysis, the process of analyzing a piece of text to gain an understanding of the attitudes, opinions and emotions expressed, provides next-level insights into how people perceive your products, services and brand. Applying this analysis across the thousands of conversations that are happening provides an authentic view of your brand. This case study explores how Indellient s sentiment analysis tool drastically impacted the marketing strategy for IBM.

3 How to Use Sentiment Analysis to Gain a Competitive Advantage Introduction Understanding consumer attitudes, emotions and opinions about your brand is a gateway to improving your offerings, services, marketing messages, customer experiences and more. Historically, firms used surveys, focus groups and net promotor scores (NPS) to measure consumer trends and opinions. However, as the wealth of feedback increases across several open platforms, traditional information gathering methods start to fall short. In addition to the limitations of a smaller sample size, there are natural biases that exist in prompted feedback mechanisms, such as surveys, that limit the ability to capture true and accurate opinions. By leveraging artificial intelligence capabilities, such as machine learning and natural language processing, you can overcome these limitations and quickly turn multiple unbiased conversations and opinions scattered across the digital landscape into insightful results that can be actioned for a better customer experience. Advanced sentiment analysis solutions provide insights that help you: 01 Gain a competitive advantage by understanding how your brand compares to others. 03 Adjust your strategies based on both positive and negative reactions of your products/ services and marketing messaging. 02 Find out the problem areas of your offerings and use that data to inform the product roadmap. 04 Optimize marketing strategies to meet consumer needs. 3

4 Sentiment Analysis in Action IBM s Chief Analytics Office (CAO) is no stranger to addressing high priority business challenges using analytics. One mission for the team is to spearhead the enterprise s effort to use analytics to make effective decisions, create new markets, and generate new revenue streams by evaluating the opportunities and challenges of IBM s offerings. By using analytics to capitalize on the data, they present their findings to IBM s executives who dictate the next best step for their brand.

5 How to Use Sentiment Analysis to Gain a Competitive Advantage Reimagining IBM s Go-To Market Strategy The CAO wanted to empower decision-makers behind IBM s global brand, including Offering Managers, Sales, Product and Brand Managers, CMO s and Customer Support Teams. To do so IBM needed to provide visibility into how their products stacked up in the public eye against the competition, so decision-makers could respond quickly and effectively to those challenges whether real or perceived. Specifically, IBM wanted to gain more valuable and accurate information in the following categories: 01 Functionality How well do their products and features work to deliver the desired outcome for consumers? 02 Usability How user-friendly are their products compared to the competition? 03 Price Where do their products rank in terms of cost? 04 Support How are their support teams performing in helping their customers? 05 Compatibility How well are their products integrating with the customer s environment? 5

6 The Challenge Starting with 75 significant product offerings, IBM needed a solution that would capture insight for these offerings and be scalable to add products going forward. They wanted to focus on unprompted conversations and reviews that capture accurate customer sentiments to complement traditional online forms and surveys. With multiple sources and thousands of feedback points, this was a difficult task. IBM needed to: 01 Find the best way to accurately process the data; 02 Learn how to analyze the data for improved business decisions; and 03 Process at scale to meet industry demands and stay ahead of the competition.

7 How to Use Sentiment Analysis to Gain a Competitive Advantage The Solution: The IBM Clarity Project Jointly developed by Indellient and the CAO, Clarity is an AIbased solution arming Offering Management, Sales, and Market Intelligence teams with the right information to make strategic decisions and leverage competitive insights to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Clarity uses IBM Watson s natural language processing capabilities and machine learning algorithms to process vast amounts of unstructured feedback on offerings and competitors to provide a complete view of the perception of IBM s competitive position. Clarity helps IBM s offering managers and support teams identify the strengths and weaknesses of our offerings, drive offering investment decisions by leveraging the voice of customers, and provides actionable insights for better results. -Amir Sabet, Senior Managing Strategy Consultant - Chief Analytics Office, Finance and Operations 7

8 The Process Clarity scans publicly posted comments, questions or complaints about IBM s offerings across the Internet s most used forums for capturing customer reviews. Using machine learning capabilities, Clarity analyses the copious amounts of data to identify relevant postings, then sorts it according to five key dimensions: Functionality, Usability, Price, Support and Compatibility. With Clarity, the teams can quickly assess sentiment, whether it is positive, negative or neutral, according to each dimension for IBM s offerings as well as for their competitor s offerings. Currently, Clarity includes review data from the following:

9 How to Use Sentiment Analysis to Gain a Competitive Advantage Results After only six months, internal adoption of the Clarity solution is now up to 150 individuals who engage with it daily. This number is expected to grow exponentially within the coming years. Offering Managers, Sales, Product and Brand Managers, CMO s and Customer Support teams are now able to gain enhanced actionable insights in half the time without the need for manual processes or data analysts to understand the results. The IBM teams now spend less time sifting through sources to find answers and more time creating a better experience for their consumers based on accurate feedback. IBM decision makers now have: Customer Insight Using machine learning algorithms to quickly and easily categorize several data points into visualizations within a single dashboard, the team has one clear source of customer perceptions. Time Savings The team has dramatically reduced the time it takes to make business decisions based on consumer feedback from weeks and months to mere minutes. Visibility IBM is aware of the top review sites that are the most meaningful to their brand. >105,000 Customer Reviews Were Analyzed Within The First Phase Of The Project 9

10 Clarity Strengthens Competitive Position Customer feedback is critical to creating products and services that will stand the test of time. Having the right data at the right time for more informed tactics and strategies is a competitive edge. Clarity is the solution for this. It enables teams to quickly benchmark their performance against their competitors, listen to their customers in a way that s meaningful to their business and make changes to products and messaging faster than ever before Get in touch with Indellient to learn more.

11 How to Use Sentiment Analysis to Gain a Competitive Advantage About Indellient Indellient, a Top Canadian ICT and Profit500 company, empowers businesses to meet and exceed their critical business and technology objectives. As part of our data and analytics services, we help you derive actionable insights from multiple, large data sets with advanced data and analysis methodologies, innovative storytelling visualization techniques, and technology partners who maximize value. Whether it s determining strategic actions, improving business performance, enhancing customer experience, measuring marketing effectiveness or simply finding better ways to reach your goals, we have the tools and expertise to get you there. About the IBM CAO Team IBM s Chief Analytics Office (CAO) is a division of IBM Corporate Headquarters. It is an elite analytics center of competency that is asked by IBM s executive team to tackle the company s most complex strategic issues. It leads internal consulting initiatives that combine business knowledge and big data analytics to direct the future of IBM s strategic transformation. 11

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