Five Top Tips for Successful Text Analytics

Successfully unearthing text analytics insights does not need to be complicated. With our five top tips, avoid the pitfalls and obtain actionable insights from unstructured text.

1. Know your purpose

Vague questions get vague answers. If you are planning text analytics of survey data and can control the questionnaire, ask a focused question. This will help orientate the respondents’ thinking so they provide richer comment, as well as the text analytics set up. For example, changing ‘any other comments’ to ‘tell us how to improve customer service’ will produce much more focused, actionable results. In social media, identifying the question is no less important –

but here it is more about deciding what you would like to learn. For example, needing to know what is being said about

a particular product on a particular forum requires a different a pproach to that required for analysis of customer

service comments relating to a given retailer.

2. Manage your organisation’s expectations

Text analytics is not a perfect solution. In 2014, Ipsos carried out a comprehensive review of the major text analytics

providers in the market and found that for all tools a balance is needed between precision (correct categorisation of

comments) and recall (ensuring all relevant comments are included in a category). Recognising that this compromise is necessary, and finding this balance, can be a challenge in text analytics. This often translates into ensuring that your business understands that the goal is to run analytics that are good enough on which to base business decisions, rather than perfect. To optimise this, it is well worth committing to investment in a thorough set up – and accepting that there is no miracle press-button solution in order to justify this.