These days, gaining customers, keeping them and attracting new ones often requires more than a great product. The most successful organizations use customer intelligence to forge relationships, hone offerings and improve decision making. Increasingly they are turning to social media, online comments, call logs, product reviews and blog posts to glean insight – all nuggets in a goldmine of potentially useful customer information.

Traditionally, analyzing such data sources was costly, difficult and time-consuming. The once-manual process of reading through these different mediums also left a wide margin for human error. Enter text analytics, a machine learning activity using big data that makes extracting value out of these virtual mountains of unstructured data possible for everyone. Until recently, it was solely the realm of specialized marketing service providers.

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Text analytics can turn a mass of words into structured content – think data tables and rows – that can then be studied in multiple ways, including to evaluate customer feedback, recommend the right product, optimize marketing and even tweak manufacturing. If you can capture it, you can analyze it. And if you can analyze it, you can use it to your advantage.

One of the easiest ways to do this is through Microsoft’s enterprise-grade cloud computing platform, Azure. The comprehensive, managed-services solution comprises all of the components needed for text analytics, including information management and storage, intelligence services and machine learning, and reporting.

We’ve created a brief demonstration showing some of the text analytics capabilities of Azure cloud services with Cortana Intelligence, Microsoft’s big data and advanced analytics suite. You’ll see an example of a customer intelligence report on Microsoft Power BI, a self-service analytics system that includes a web publishing component allowing sharing via multiple mediums – including phone, web browsers, tablets, desktops and laptops.

Azure has simplified the once-difficult and specialized task of gauging customer sentiment, making the technology accessible to all.

Interested in exploring how text analytics can benefit your organization? Let us help! Reach out to 3Cloud today.