Analyzing Opinions on the Internet
Chat rooms, message boards, Intranets and newsgroups are rich, dynamic, global sources of information that are constantly refreshed. But, searching for information about a particular product results in a myriad of opinions—and not all of them you can trust. Even if you could search for and find opinions about your company or product efficiently, it is extremely difficult and time-consuming to analyze them meaningfully.
Businesses spend more than US$13 billion to conduct market research about their products and services. A growing portion of that budget is spent on Web-based research. Today, the Internet is vast, dynamic and very influential in driving consumer opinion. Nonetheless, there are more than 550 billion documents within the Internet, most of which are unstructured. They come from a plethora of electronic sources, in multiple formats, languages and locations. Although organizations recognize the value of the Web, they waste considerable time and resources trying to access information with inefficient tools such as conventional search engines.
The Sentiment Monitoring Services prototype, developed by Accenture Technology Labs, provides an easy and efficient way for enterprises to gauge customer sentiment from Internet sources. Sentiment Monitoring Services allows businesses to tap into the Internet—which consumers already use to share honest feedback on products and services—and to leverage this information throughout every level of the organization.
The Technology
Sentiment Monitoring Services searches preferred sites or newsgroups on the Internet for opinions. Using advanced language technologies, it interprets the sentiment of the text towards a specified product or service and then provides the user with an analysis of the results. Sentiment Monitoring Services combines a search agent and a perception engine to present users with an instant gauge of market perception of any feature, product, brand or organization. The natural language processor of the perception engine achieves an accuracy of approximately 90 percent compared to opinion ratings ranked manually.
Sentiment Monitoring Services is built using various standard software components to ease integration into existing IT systems. An easy-to-use interface, with user-defined search topics and parameters, reads any electronic content in multiple languages. Real-time responses are summarized and the results are clearly formatted and easily repeatable.
The Implications
Sentiment Monitoring Services provides accurate and up-to-the-minute information that nearly every department in an organization can rely upon—from corporate strategy and design to product development, marketing, sales and customer service.
For instance, a sales person, distributor or marketing executive can use the prototype to get instant feedback about a new advertising campaign; a political group could get instant access on public opinion related to global events; a product designer could access important consumer opinion on a particular feature of their product.
By efficiently collecting, organizing and analyzing data, Sentiment Monitoring Services provides companies with a competitive advantage, helping executives gain real-time insight into information and opinions found on the Internet.
uCommerce
Accenture believes that as successive waves of economic and technological change converge, truly ubiquitous commerce or uCommerce is becoming a reality—a new always on, always active, always aware business environment. The ubiquitous nature of the Internet, and the information it generates, poses great business opportunities for those who can turn information into knowledge. Accenture Technology Labs developed Sentiment Monitoring Services and other prototypes to demonstrate and explore business opportunities that are created by uCommerce.