Translating Community Forum Data Into Customer Insights

To better understand its customers, a leading product development company wanted to explore the unstructured data of open-ended conversations in its customer support and product idea online community forums hosted by a prominent vendor.

By combining the client’s online forum data with its CRM and customer service software data and deploying natural language processing, ORI quickly turned customer conversations into actionable information.

Challenge

The client needed unstructured data mining services to gain visibility into the questions and issues customers were encountering, how these issues affected clients across different industries, and how they differed between segments. The client was also interested in determining who was talking about which topics, where discussions were taking place, and when they were occurring.

Solution

Leveraging the natural language processing (NLP) technology in ORI’s advanced text analytics solution, our team examined the client’s online forum data while combining it with the data in its customer relationship management (CRM) and customer service software to quickly turn customer conversations into actionable information. ORI applied theme detection and classification models to identify primary conversation topics and then used sentiment and effort analysis to uncover the top drivers of low sentiment and high effort. ORI also analyzed participation behaviors to identify centers of influence at the individual and account levels.

Outcome

The analysis identified customer pain points affecting a broad range of industries as well as suggestions for product improvement. In addition, insights into customer behaviors uncovered potential for cross-sell, upsell, and engagement opportunities.