Case Study:
Discovering a Wealth of Untapped Customer Insight

Through effective use of text analytics and by taking action on customer insights, this leader in data storage systems made changes that not only benefitted their customers, but also saved their company $34 million.

EMC, a global leader in IT, enhanced their voice-of-the-customer strategy by implementing a text analytics program to complement the insights they were receiving from customer surveys. They leveraged text mining – the practice of taking thousands of unstructured customer comments and systematically categorizing and applying sentiment to them. By building a powerful source of actionable customer insights, they were able to better meet and exceed
customer needs.

Challenge

Measuring the total customer experience is serious business for EMC—they have embraced a customer measurement system that allows them to collect feedback through multiple listening posts, funnel those findings to the “right” people – both for immediate action if required and for more systemic planning, and consolidate key messages for use by their executive teams.

Even with a strong customer strategy in place, unstructured customer comments were recognized as an untapped and under-utilized area of customer intelligence. In one year alone, EMC’s customers submitted more than 11,000 comments and suggestions to their customer support services. At this volume, they needed a systematic method to review customer comments to determine common pain points and suggestions that could be used to influence business decisions and improve the customer experience.

How

Working in partnership with Walker, they embarked upon a new advanced text analytics initiative to turn unstructured customer comments into structured, scalable, accessible, and actionable feedback.

Walker leveraged best-in-class text analytics software from Clarabridge to implement the program. The text analytics engine allowed for efficient categorization of customer comments to build definitions for a series of categories. To ensure the information was meaningful to their business, they worked with Walker collaboratively to construct the definitions for each category.

Once categorized, newly structured customer comments became accessible in Walker’s Business Intelligence tool to allow for easy identification and temperature measurement of key themes.

Outcome

The tool also allowed for linkage of customer comments to survey and segmentation to filter comments specific to pertinent business entities. In just six months, they developed an automated solution to track customer comments, and were able to gain benefits including the ability to uncover hidden insights from customers as well as track their pain points. They can also integrate this information with quantitative results, giving them additional intelligence to drive business decisions.

Now, EMC is poised to explore additional feedback from other arenas, pulling unstructured comments from internal sources, enabling even stronger usage of customer feedback across the organization.