Understanding the ‘Voice of the Customer’ in Community Forum Data

A large membership organization needed to quickly and cost-effectively explore the unstructured data in its private online community forum. The client wanted to understand the voice of the customer (VOC) and gain visibility into the top concerns of C-level customers in order to guide strategy, meet emerging needs, and deliver more value.

The findings pointed to unmet needs and specific topics for the client to target in future materials, information, service offerings, training, and events to boost engagement.

Challenge

For several years, the client had successfully used its community forum to promote dialogue among customers. Initial data mining suggested high-value insights existed within the data, but open-ended comments had not been rigorously analyzed to identify and address trending topics and areas of concern and opportunity.

Solution

Leveraging ORI’s advanced text analytics solution with natural language processing (NLP) technology, our team applied theme detection and classification models to identify the primary theme in CEO forum posts as well as an extremely active “center of influence.” The findings pointed to unmet needs and specific topics for the client to target in future materials, information, service offerings, training, and events to boost engagement. In addition, sentiment and emotion analysis and level of effort (LOE) detection revealed that customers who actively engaged with the online community forum had higher overall satisfaction.

Outcome

Conversational analytics identified several top-priority themes resonating with C-level customers vs. other segments—along with insight into why certain topics trend, centers of influence leading the dialogue, and opportunities for the client to generate additional value for customers. Having proven the efficiency and effectiveness of this approach to unstructured data mining, the client is now equipped to mine insights from the broader community, test hypotheses, and drive higher value from its online community forum.