Converting Customer Feedback into Strategic Advantage—An Entrieva Case Study
The customer, a Fortune 300 food company with thousands of locations and millions of customers, currently deploys a variety of programs for improving customer satisfaction, food innovation, service quality, product marketing, operations and engineering. Today the information for managing and maintaining continual customer and employee (manager) feedback is obtained from e-mails, submitted survey forms and other written documents. This strategic feedback is received from thousands of different, disparate sources on a daily basis. As a result, the ability to "make sense" of this large volume of unstructured data and thereby determine if there are either favorable or unfavorable trends (e.g. by geography, food quality or service levels, etc.) is extremely difficult if not impossible. The feedback could only be anecdotally analyzed by reading separate documents, printed reports or e-mails generated from internal and outside sources and then attempting to draw or infer a conclusion. Additionally, the company wanted to have the ability to identify "non-obvious" patterns in customer feedback and be able to have a more flexible "discovery" based information analysis process.
The Solution
Using Entrieva's SemioTagger and SemioSkyline software, the company is deploying an "information discovery and analysis" application to analyze and uncover important trends in customer feedback information.
SemioTagger enables the company to crawl all of the disparate, unstructured data, automatically identify and extract key concepts (i.e., the key product and service issues) from all feedback sources and then categorize the results into a logical category structure using an interface that allows for viewing the results from the previous unstructured, disparate data.
The company can now view all of their "feedback" information using a single interface that can "map" relationships of a variety of different issues (e.g., comparing food ingredients to product quality, product quality to service or store location, store location to ingredients, etc.). They can realistically create any "view" of any identified data points and spot trends to analyze further or upon which to take appropriate action. Additionally, the company found a new way to enhance their existing reporting. The company has historically analyzed structured information, such as sales reporting, and has been able to easily generate reports based on numbers—but not correlated with unstructured information (i.e. free-form text, report-style information) such as customer comments, operational comments and other product or service issues, etc. Previously, it had no easy way to correlate and view this type of information from a strategic level to make informed decisions about the company quality and customer satisfaction programs. This new combined "view" into the information for the company is seen as a significant advancement for improving customer service programs and maintaining a high level of quality and service.
The Results
The company will now be able to "see" information and patterns not previously known or obvious. It is relatively easy to view links and relationships between identified issues, leading them down new paths of discovery of favorable and unfavorable trends. For example, they can now link new product changes with customer survey data by geographic store locations. This provides them the ability to improve timeliness of actions to take advantage of favorable trends and at the same time make changes to address unfavorable ones.
Time to MarketJanuary 2003 implementation start; September 2003 deployment.
ROI More flexible analysis and response capability for quality and customer satisfaction programs with benefits of time-savings through a more efficient information discovery process.
Results Achieved the goal of improving the speed of analysis and response to customer feedback and thereby improve food quality and ultimate customer satisfaction.
Thomas C. Lewis ("Tom") is President & CEO of Entrieva. He has been active in managing successful start-up businesses for over 25 years. He initially joined Entrieva's predecessor as Vice President & CFO in June 2000. In April 2001, he was elected President & CEO of Entrieva. Since that time, he has successfully redesigned, redirected and grown Entrieva's business to over 100 successful customer implementations.
Entrieva, Inc., founded in 1999, is a venture-backed company that provides real-time intelligence gathering and content delivery software. The Entrieva suite adds real-time discovery, categorization and notification to enterprise applications, databases or Web sites. It provides enterprises with the ability to continuously monitor data streams and patterns of information activity in real time. When the monitored information meets predetermined criteria, the system alerts selected individuals and supplies them with a real-time data feed. Entrieva's ease of installations, rapid ROI and demonstrable results have made it the solution of choice for more than 100 private sector and government clients. Entrieva's investors include the Redleaf Group Inc., Intel Capital and RBC Capital Markets . For more information, visit Entrieva