I’ll start with a bit of history. I was born in 1988; at about that time, text analytics was a mere glint in the eye of the burgeoning ERP, CRM & BI software markets providing the enterprise with decision support across a growing volume of structured & numeric enterprise data.
It wasn’t till the mid-90’s that any attention was paid to the plethora of unstructured text that makes up, depending who you listen to, 80 to 85% of all enterprise data. Over time, applications moved from simple statistical analysis to more complex hybrid statistical and linguistic approaches; aiming to uncover hidden and complex relationships within oceans of text – with more & more metadata to support deeper contextual analysis.
But until around 2005, text analytics remained a behind-the-scenes research tool. Then social media happened and the market transformed. In 2010, the market was estimated at around $835m with handsome growth forecasts and an ever-increasing slice of Gartner’s $10bn+ BI/Analytics/Performance Management software market.
Today there is a strong demand for business users to digest metadata and text analytics output on demand, with SaaS delivery models to ensure enterprises can cost-effectively enter the marketplace. It is a highly opaque & fragmented market with differentiated vendors offering both generic and highly vertical-specific technology as both stand-alone text analytics platforms and as part of broader offerings – CEM included. The race is very much on to help organisations get to grips with big data – and a large part of this will be the ability generate value from the explosion of solicited & unsolicited text about organisations and their brands.
The NICE Voice of the Customer Solution sits at the crest of a large social-media fuelled wave of enterprise demand. A single solution to drive effective collection, interpretation & operationalisation of behavioural, contextual and attitudinal customer data is rooted in market-leading text analytics.
As a relatively immature technology, there is immense potential in the market: for language proliferation away from English-dominated offerings, for cohesion with speech analytics and for more accurate predictive analytics.
And to each of these ends, NICE Systems is in an excellent position to lead the market into an exciting cross-channel future.
Andrew Robson
For more info on NICE Systems Voice of the Customer Solutions please visit www.nice.com