Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
questions, and the intent is to sell more services and not address issues. While we appreciate the
self -service channels you have opened, the services provided by direct channels have deteriorated.
Should this trend continue, I would be forced to consider other alternatives.
Sincerely,
John Doe
In this email, there are several key issues, associated sentiments, and comparisons that need to be
analyzed carefully. If the customer had written this email and then in a 30-day timeframe followed up
with a call to let Acme Inc. know that they are moving on and terminating all the relationships, there
was time to react had the email been parsed and an alert raised on a potential attrition situation.
Why is this analysis and proactive action important? Because if John Doe has 50 friends who hear
this story, chances are a potential loss of all 50 customers, or over a period of time a loss of groups of
customers, all of which lead to a negative impact on the revenue. If John Doe expresses these senti-
ments and experiences in social media channels, the impact is viral and irreparable. There is brand
reputation at stake and more customer attrition that will follow the social media posts.
As we can see from this short discussion, there is a lot of hidden value in Big Data, and not har-
nessing this in the right time and providing the results to the right business users will have a negative
impact. However, the same situation, if provided in the right time to the business users, can result in a
proactive reaction to the customer resulting in more favorable outcomes.
To get an all-round level of information, and gain near-perfect and accurate actionable insights,
these companies decided to go beyond just sentiment analytics, to integrate data across multi-
ple channels including email and social media analytics. Not only will this bring better insights, it
will provide the organizations with the ability to predict and model customer behavior and be pre-
pared to react better at such situations. Additionally, the data and analytics will enable the business
user community to better address their knowledge base and learnings, and better aid their customer
interactions.
Solution design
Figure 5.1
shows a high-level integration approach where we combine processing structured data
from online transaction processing (OLTP)/operational data store (ODS) systems and process the
extract, transform, and load (ETL) rules, and alongside, process unstructured data from sentiments,
emails, and social media channels. The advantage of combining the data from both the sources is we
can get a holistic view of the customer. The linkage between the different data types will be enabled
by the existing master data management (MDM) and metadata collections, which can be augmented
with taxonomies and ontologies from vendor solutions.
Enabling a better cross-sell and upsell opportunity
After implementing this solution, say Acme Inc. has concluded a campaign for a new integrated portfolio
services plan to its customers, who were segmented with newer algorithms and sent specific offers based
on their buying trends, life situation, and socioeconomic situations in the geography. The campaign has
resulted in several calls from the customer community to call center and business services teams.
