My Feelings About Sentiment Analysis | The Intelligent Enterprise Blog.

Posted by Seth Grimes

Growth in visibility, acceptance, and adoption of automated sentiment solutions has been unhindered bythe debate about automated sentiment analysis. Growth is fueled by solution-provider innovations —Clarabridge yesterday announced availability of a text/sentiment API, facilitating inclusion of analyses into applications, joining solutions from rivals includingAttensity,Expert System,Saplo,Lexalytics, andOpen Amplify, the latter three offered additionally as free services — and by positive customer experiences including the success stories reported by Elizabeth Glagowski in an article,Getting Emotional About Sentiment Analysis, that appeared on June 28 in 1to1 magazine.

Liz interviewed me for her article. With her permission, I will share the full interview with readers.

1to1> How does sentiment analysis deepen a company’s understanding of customers?

You can tell a lot about customers by analyzing purchases and services usage and inquiries, but transactional records won’t tell you the Why behind consumer behavior — what motivates your customers — and they won’t tell you anything about the folks whom you want to be customers but aren’t yet. For a complete picture, companies need to listen to the “voice of the customer,” and to get at the richness of the VOC message, they need to do sentiment analysis, to understand attitudes, opinions, and emotions in the customer’s (and prospect’s) own words.

Whether you chose a manual approach — good for very focused problems — or an automated solution, sentiment analysis is key to understanding and acting on the voice of the customer.

Continues @http://intelligent-enterprise.informationweek.com/blog/archives/2010/06/my_feelings_abo.html