Over the past couple of years text and sentiment analytics have been applied to traditional and social feedback (surveys, review sites, social media) to track issues, trends, correlations of experiences to survey or experience outcomes – using a mix of statistical and quantitative analysis techniques.
2012 will see a continuation of these techniques, but with a greater degree of multichannel source fusion and integration as companies look to merge all identities of a customer together, and all feedback channels into a holistic view. Additionally – I expect to see innovative organizations blurring the lines between market research and customer engagement through the application of analytics to deduce issues, problems, and sales/churn events as they are developing, and take proactive means to either: 1) engage with a customer operationally on a 1:1 basis through solutions that integrate survey and social text/sentiment analytics with customer relationship management (CRM) and business process management (BPM) solutions, or 2) resolve an issue at a more macroscopic level by using text/sentiment analytics to identify and tracking growth rates of significant but quantitatively infrequent issues and fixing them before they create a material impact on customer sentiment.