I am sitting in a conference on intelligent content and have seen all sorts of great presentations about how static information, when “annotated” or “tagged” with metadata can come alive and become valuable information to organizations. It reminded me that I’ve been wanting to write a blog about our methodology, backed by our technology called LARA – LISTEN, ANALYZE, RELATE, ACT. LARA provides the process and applications by which organizations can harness the massive value hidden in user generated content as a business asset.
So, what is LARA?
LARA is a process by which organizations can take user generated content (UGC) whether generated by consumers talking in web forums, micro-blogging sites, facebook, feedback surveys, emails, documents, research, etc., etc. and use it as a business asset in a business process. Let me break it down for you…
- “Listen” – to “listen” is actually a process in itself that encompasses both the capability to listen to the open web (forums, blogs, tweets, you name it) and the capability to seamlessly access enterprise information (CRM notes, documents, emails, etc.) It takes both a listening post (Attensity Cloud), deep federated search capabilities, scraping and enterprise class data integration found in Attensity Integration and wrapped up in a complete, easy to set-up solution for listening!
- “Analyze” – now here is where the “secret sauce” comes in! How can you take all of this mass of unstructured data and make sense of it? Using our patented Semantic Server that includes keyword, statistical and natural language approaches we are able to essentially tag or “barcode” every word and the relationships between words making it data that can be accessed, searched, routed, counted, analyzed, charted, reported on and even reused! We do this using a process that doesn’t require the user to define keywords or terms that they want their system to look for or include in a rule base, but rather it automatically identifies these terms (“facts,” people, places, things, etc.) and their relationships other terms or combinations of terms – making it easy to use, maintain and also more accurate than what others in the text analytics space have to offer.
- “Relate” – ok, so now that you have found the insights and can analyze the unstructured data -the real value comes in when you can connect it to your “structured” data. Your customers (which customer segment is complaining about your product most?), your products (which product is having the issue?), your parts (is there a problem with a specific part manufactured by a specific partner?), your locations (is the customer that is tweeting about wanting a sandwich near your nearest lunch store?) and so on. Now you can ask questions of your data and get deep, actionable insights.
- “Act” – now here is where it gets exciting! What do I do with the new customer insight I’ve obtained? How do I leverage the problem resolution content a customer created that I just identified? How do I connect with a customer who is uncovering issues that are important to us or asking for help? How do I route the insights to the right people? And how do I engage with customers, partners and influencers once I understand what they are saying? This is our act step. We’ve invested in a suite of applications that offer great value to end customers and companies when unstructured data is accessed. These applications include Voice of the Customer analysis, Intelligence Analysis, Research and Discovery, Risk Identification, and E-Service/Self Service.
If you want to learn more about our lovely LARA – let us know – we will send you a white paper on the subject….now I’ve got to get back to listening to this conference!!
