By Andrew Lane

I’m always saying to my wife ‘I can’t remember everything you say to me, I wouldn’t have any room left in my brain’!  I’m sure everything I need to remember to do, pick up, drop off, fix etc. is in there but (like all men) I often miss that vital detail which would make my life much simpler….

For most businesses, the same is true of their customers – extensive, wide-ranging and almost certainly detailed feedback is coming in 24/7.  All collected in huge Excel docs (other spreadsheets are available) and stored away.  Thousands of lines of direct feedback on how customers and partners think the business can help them which is never fed into planning cycles for sales staff, marketing campaigns, or other customer touch points - too labour intensive to read line by line and analyse.

Microsoft is no different to these businesses – they collect this ‘verbatim comment’ data from events, customer service lines, surveys and other channels 100’s of times a year…..then hide it in the dark when it could help make marketing spend much more effective.  Metia was approached to see if it could help alleviate this issue at a time when the customer and partner experience team were running numerous manual data mining exercises.  The workload was becoming unmanageable.

‘Spotlight’ was born, a Windows desktop application allowing any user to load verbatim comments and see the most frequent keywords, their connections to other keywords, search for specific keywords in the verbatim comments plus, produce reports visually representing the sentiment of the comments.  SQL Server analyses every word, removes ‘noise’ words (and, the, be etc.) and produces a list of the keywords in frequency order in a ready prepared Excel file.  Users can then use the SQL data mining add-in to create standard visual reports.  A simple tool allows the user to select keywords of importance to them and with one click create a custom report showing all those comments containing those keywords.

The impact?  Any business, within any country (a number of other languages are supported) can now dust off those verbatim comment files, run a report and instantly see where they should effectively spend marketing funds, allocate resources or change processes. 

If only I could get my wife to write everything she says in an Excel file...