Attensity Company Blog

• The Apple iPad: Do People Like It? Will People Buy It?

  February 01, 2010 • Author: Phil Talsky • 1 comment • Leave your comment
  Tags: Attensity, Business Intelligence, Social Media, Text Analytics, Voice of the Customer

  Last week Apple announced one of the world's worst-kept secrets, the iPad.  Being the gadget freak that I am, of course I watched the announcement stream (amazingly, Apple didn't stream it directly, so I watched bootleg streams on another site).  I was actually surprised at how pedestrian the announcement was.  It really didn't seem up to the Apple standard.  It was low-key.
  
  And, of course I planned to do an analysis of what others think about the iPad using Attensity Cloud and Attensity Analyze to extract purchase intent, understand general sentiment and feature-level opinions.  But I went about it in a slightly different way this time.  I looked at it in three different time ranges.  First, I pulled 20,000 tweets two hours before the announcement.  Then I pulled another 20,000 tweets two hours after the announcement, and finally, I pulled 15,000 tweets four days after the announcement.  I wanted to see how the sentiment was trending and what people were talking about before, during and after the announcement, and here's what I found.
  
  Before the announcement, the sentiment wasn't overwhelmingly ecstatic, but a significant majority liked the product they would learn was called the iPad.
  
  
  
  So, what's really interesting is, that based on rumors, almost as many people liked the iPad as didn't like it, and there wasn't a lot of extreme emotion about it.
  
  Now, when we look at the two hour period after the announcement, we see an interesting change (especially for Apple):
  
  
  
  Clearly, in the immediate aftermath, the announcement went well for Apple.  More than double the number of people liked the iPad versus those that weren't thrilled with it. And more important, the percentage of people that didn't express an opinion dropped significantly.  And, the number of people that were extremely negative dropped to almost zero.
  
  Finally, let's see how people feel after they've had some time to think about it (four days to be exact):
  
  
  
  So, four days later, the sentiment is generally the same, though a few people that weren't thrilled with the iPad have moved to hating it.  This is a good sign for Apple.  The sentiment is holding positive.  (I will revisit iPad sentiment a few weeks after it ships to see if the sentiment holds once people actually get to start using them.)
  
  Applications Rule
  
  Next I wanted to see if there were any features that were driving how people feel about the iPad. 
  
  For those that like or love the iPad, the top five features they talked about were:
  
  
  Lack of Flash Support A Big Problem
  
  And for those not thrilled or who expressed very negative sentiment about the iPad:
  
  
  
  Already I am starting to see a couple of problems for Apple.  Clearly the lack of Flash support is going to be a problem, and Apple's lack of support is surprising.  Second, that the perception is that it is just a big iPhone, and that people already have an iPhone.  And, in one place where they might have a strong opportunity, the eBook readers space, people love their Kindles (myself included).   It also appears that they made the same mistake with the iPad that they did with the iPhone:  customers cannot change the battery themselves.
  
  So, Will They Buy??
  
  Finally, are people saying they are going to buy an iPad?  You bet they are.  Overwhelmingly.  But, the purchase intent is starting to drop off.  Here's how it has looked over the past two weeks:
  
  
  
  And what's interesting is that while there was a major spike in purchase intent on the day of the announcement, it dropped off very quickly.  And, those saying they will not buy has remained constant (and actually more people now are talking about not buying an iPad than are talking about buying one.)
  
  So, I really think the jury is out.  Will I buy one?  Probably, because I don't have an iPhone (I'm a very loyal, extremely happy Verizon customer and Droid owner).  Will it replace my Kindle? Probably not.  Will it be another fun toy in the arsenal, of course it will!
  
  
  

• The Open Enterprise

  January 11, 2010 • Author: Michelle de Haaff • 0 comments • Leave your comment
  Tags: Customer Service, E-Service, Social Media, Text Analytics, Voice of the Customer

  We've been talking a lot lately with our customers and partners about the transformation in customer interactions as a function of social media. Social media has radically changed the ways that customers expect companies to interact with them. Notice the word "expect."  Expectations of companies have changed.  As social media has given consumers voice - it has also given them a bullhorn and that bullhorn has given them the power to chose the channel they expect companies to interact with them on, versus only using the channels that a company directs them to.
  
  This change tracks closely to the change that has been happening to enterprises around the process of using external data, found online, as part of key business processes - whether it is customer service, customer analytics, voice of the customer, research, risk and compliance, etc.
  
  In the 80's and 90's organizations were closed.  External information was rarely brought into corporate systems. External reports were used and read, but they were highly focused and controlled.  In the early 90's many large companies created internal email systems or sub-nets.  By the late 90's external and internal email capability was pervasive. Business users started to gain limited access to the Internet.  Still highly controlled, Internet access is now also pervasive. In the last 18-24 months social media has taken over as the new external information that organizations are trying to figure out how to handle - specifically as it relates to two areas:
  
  1) How to engage customers using social media
  2) How to interact and respond with customers in social media
  
  And in the process of navigating through these questions, organizations are taking on an even bigger question - how do I leverage Internet data, social media, along with other Internet data (sometimes referred to as social as well - but not always)like research articles, news, etc. inside of my business processes?
  
  Enter - The Open Enterprise.
  
  Core to the Attensity strategy are important capabilities that enable organizations to leverage the Internet in key business processes in a secure and scalable way.  The successful Enterprise now needs to leverage the treasure trove of the Internet combing it with corporate insights and making it an important decision making asset in key business processes like:
  

  • Customer service and quality management
    
  • Marketing
  • PR/Reputation management
  • Product development and innovation
  • Research
  • Risk and compliance
  We had a whole bunch of releases this past fall that focused on enabling Enterprises to leverage the Internet to reduce research costs, improve customer satisfaction, improve product quality, reduce risks, and to overall improve competitive positioning.
  
  • Attensity Cloud - rapid and easy social media monitoring and analysis.
  • Attensity Analyze for VOC 5.2 - in-depth actionable customer analytics on issues, sentiment, competitive opportunities, product quality, and more - includes analysis of and alerts on social media and "internal" VOC data in surveys, emails, CRM notes, etc.
  • Attensity Discover 6.0 -a search and collaboration based application for researchers that enables large scale discovery of insights found in documents, letters, legal papers, and the Internet.
    
  • Attensity E-Service  -an end-to-end service suite that enables companies to respond to customers conversations (social posts, emails, letters, etc.) and to deliver valuable service knowledge (created in our knowledge base or by customers online) to end customers and service agents.
    
  A little more about how we do this is covered in this post:
  Conversation as a Complex Event - James Kobielus (Senior Analyst at Forrester Research)
  
  Interested in securely opening up your enterprise to the Internet to super-charge your key business processes?  Give us a call. Have an example of how you are doing this?  Post a comment - we are interested!
  

• Is Nexus the Nexus?

  January 06, 2010 • Author: Phil Talsky • 0 comments • Leave your comment
  Tags: Text Analytics, Social Media, Voice of the Customer

  Google Nexus One Social Media Sentiment Analysis
  
  When Verizon launched the Droid, Attensity went out and pulled social media data (from Twitter and other Blogs and Forums) and performed a sentiment analysis to see how people felt about the new Droid and what was driving that sentiment.
  
  Well, today Google announced the Nexus One, so we thought it would be interesting to see what the market thinks....
  
  This time around, we used Attensity Cloud to pull about 15,000 Tweets from Twitter and ran them through Attensity Analyze for Voice of the Customer. Here are the results.
  
  Do people like it?
  
  Well, the overall sentiment looks very favorable:
  
  
  What features do they like or not like?
  
  Next we looked at what features of the phone they were talking about, and found that overall there is not a lot of specific chatter about specific features.  This is probably due to the fact that very few people (outside of Google) have actually had much hands-on time with the phone.  However, we did look at what features are impacting sentiment.....
  
  What features are driving sentiment?
  
  We also wanted to understand what features, if any, were driving sentiment.  Here we did find an interesting story.
  
  For those that like or love the Nexus One, these are the features they are talking about:
  
  
  And, for those that are not thrilled with or hate the Nexus One, these are the features they are talking about:
  
  For those that are positive and those that are negative, it seems that what the Android is said to be is what will help to drive adoption of the Nexus One and the perceived lack of Applications compared to other options could be a barrier.  But the telling factor in adoption comes from the next analysis....
  
  Purchase Intent
  
  When we ran our Purchase Intent Sentimetrics on the Tweet analysis, here is what we found:
  
  Those talking about it - are mostly going to try it!
  
  So overall, this looks like a good announcement for Google.  A very large percentage of the Tweets analyzed indicate a strong intent to buy the Nexus One.  But, how influential are these "Tweeters"? Let's have a look...
  
  Intend to Buy:  100 "Tweeters" that have indicated that they intend to buy the Nexus One have 1,000 or more followers.  Five of the people in this category have more than 10,000 followers. So they are quite influential.
  
  Will Not Buy:  Eight of the people in this category have more than 1,000 followers, with two having more than 10,000.
  
  The person with the most followers in our sampling, at nearly 83,000 followers, indicates that the phone has a flaw that is a deal breaker.  And the deal breaker for this person is the message s/he received on the Google.com/phone Web site:  "Sorry the Nexus One phone is not available in your country!!!!"
  
  More analysis coming to you soon......that's all for now!
  

• Attensity Analyze for VOC - Take Action on Customer Data

  December 15, 2009 • Author: Michelle de Haaff • 1 comment • Leave your comment
  Tags: untagged

  We announced Attensity Analyze for VOC last month (aka Attensity 5.2) and I wanted to take a few minutes to tell you more about it.
  
  Attensity Analyze for VOC consists of a number of client and market driven enhancements expanding on our focus to enable our customers to be able to analyze customer conversations, across any channel and to take action on the insights found.  This release encompasses reporting, analysis, usability, performance, integration, quality and workflow enhancements based on direct feedback from customers, partners, and our field.  General highlights include:
  
  Deep Customer Analytics and Exploration
  

  • Share your results easily and fast with distributable and printable query results via portable swf (shockwave) files viewable in HTML, Powerpoint, MS Office or printable in a PDF format.
  • Understand customer issues and information over time through deeper trending analysis, including normalized (%) time-series charts, accounting for variation in document counts over time periods and more!
  • Net Promoter, customer loyalty, sentiment and other calculated scores are now even easier to create with this release.  As customer conversations are analyzed, the application automatically dynamically generates these important calculated values!
  • Easily manage, categorize and analyze not only issues, but the relationship between issues and people, places and things for a deeper understanding of customer conversations through "doubles" and "triples" categorization modals.
  • Who said that? With our deeper anaphora resolution capabilities in this release, the application automatically handles inanimate object references to “it”, commonly found in VOC data.  Example: “I closed my account last week. It was too expensive.”  Anaphora resolution resolves that “it” in this case is referencing “account” and generates the fact “account:expensive”.  
  • Want to identify and understand people, places and things better? With this release, the Inxight Thingfinder capability is automatically enabled in our engines!
  • Want to take action and respond to a customer's issues, questions and cries for help?  This release includes a direct feeder into Attensity Respond for real-time follow-up and participation in social media discussions.
    
  • Live updates and deep linking with leading BI and data warehouses are also included...
  • And more!
    
  
  If you are interested in seeing this release or upgrading - contact us - we can get you started!
  
  

• (Even real-time) search is not enough

  December 07, 2009 • Author: Catherine van Zuylen • 0 comments • Leave your comment
  Tags: Search, Text Analytics, Social Media

  Recently, the internet has grown into a treasure trove of customer, product, competitive, research, and market information. Information about business trends, risks, and opportunities are waiting for the enterprise to unlock. With the rise of increased connectivity and social media, a large volume of near-real-time “first person intelligence” is available for companies to examine. More and more, people are turning to social media to communicate their experiences and issues with products and companies. These communications contain product suggestions, requests for help, frustrations and intents-to-leave, and other time-sensitive information.
  
  THE RISE OF SEARCH
  
  In response to the rising volumes of communications, search became more important to the enterprise. Companies like Google and Yahoo rose to help find information on the internet, while companies like Autonomy, Verity, and Endeca arose to help enterprises find their internal information. Search can be a very useful tool for locating a particular document of interest containing a search term. For example, you can tell a search engine to “find all emails containing the words ‘oil drilling’” or to “find documents about my company”.
  
  However, search begins to be inadequate for revealing trends or performing complex operations. For example, if a company is interested in monitoring social media for information on the top 10 issues that customers have with their products, a company will generally create queries for the name of the companies, their products, and so forth. Then, personnel must manually read through the search results and tally up the issues by hand. What happens is that you can get hundreds, or even thousands of results that then need to be read and tallied to get a picture of what people think about your products and services.
  
  Where using search becomes even more complicated is where it is difficult to define a small set of keywords that can get you the answers you seek.
  
  For example, how would you ask a search engine to deliver to your inbox all tweets and forum postings where someone is seeking your help? Or have an engine automatically route to product management various product suggestions? Or have customer service be quickly alerted to messages indicating an intent-to-leave?
  
  THE RISE OF TEXT MINING
  
  A similar situation used to exist in the world of physical goods. Back when there was a limited variety of goods sold at the corner shop, it was not a big deal to be able to manually inventory, sort, and count goods. If you had cans of tomatoes, you could walk down your aisles every night, quickly count the 20 cans on the shelf, inventory those as “tomatoes”, and reorder more cans of tomatoes on a weekly basis.
  
  But, as the volume and variety of goods increased, and as just-in-time delivery of those goods became more expected, the process needed to become more automated. So the barcode was invented and standardized as a standard way of expressing the “aboutness” of a product. With the invention of the barcode and its cousin, the RFID tag, new generations of products were able to be designed to inventory, track, and move goods based on this “aboutness”.
  
  Likewise, with the rise of unstructured data volumes and the need for just-in-time delivery of information, a new system was needed that would go beyond keyword indexing. This new system was text analysis –  a way of “barcoding text” that could express information about that text and allow it to be mined for information and moved to the appropriate place based on its aboutness.
  
  In our next blog, we'll explore the rise of text mining, and why keyword-based systems are also not enough.