Large companies are so swamped by customer feedback they are unable to analyse it in a meaningful way. The sheer volume and variety of insight prohibits its full use to help provide better customer service and aid management decision-making.

So says a report from the UK’s Warwick Business School, which studied 3,000 pieces of actual customer feedback from the retailer Asda, car maker Audi and rail operator National Express. 

With large multinational companies encouraging feedback via multiple sources, such as text and voice messages, contact forms, letters and increasingly social media platforms, internal marketing teams are simply unable to analyse all customer feedback received, due to time constraints and fatigue encountered when reading and processing customer comments.

Chris Worth, an associate of Warwick Business School, said: "Faced with a mass of data, humans will make a rational choice: cut down the complexity to something manageable. When dealing with thousands of customer comments, that led to 75 per cent of the data being tossed and the focus narrowing to a few key categories. That’s dangerous, because the most profitable opportunities are often hidden in little gems of data hidden in dark corners . . . which companies appear to be missing."

The research pitted three human analysts against Rant & Rave, text analysis technology which has been developed by Rapide Communication in association with the University of Birmingham, to study customer feedback. A thousand pieces represents the minimum average amount of feedback a high street company can expect per month. When companies are running special promotions actively asking for feedback, the number can even reach 100,000 pieces of feedback per month. In a major company, the feedback would need to be analysed and used as the basis of concrete recommendations to remedy any issues raised within the feedback. The analysis is then further collated to provide information which is critical to improving the overall customer experience from the company. 

Each human analyst spent 30-50 hours (132 in total) looking at 750 pieces of feedback (250 from each company). They all did the same set of 750 ie a quarter of the total (3,000 comments) and had to discard 75 per cent of the data due to time constraints. Even handling 750 comments each was difficult to manage along with other work responsibilities which they were expected to handle to replicate a typical customer feedback analyst’s role. The analysts needed to sort the feedback into 15 different categories and rank each piece of feedback according to the positive or negative sentiment expressed within it. They were also asked to provide suggestions and risks related to the feedback. But the humans were unable to spot trends or provide meaningful recommendations or risks as the human brain simply cannot process such large data sets.

Rant & Rave, the analysing software, processed (categorised, ranked and made recommendations) the full 3,000 pieces of feedback in less than five minutes. 

Nigel Shanahan, MD of Rapide Communication (www.rapide.co.uk), said: “Getting to the heart of what a customer wants is critical today as high street brands fight even harder to keep their customer base loyal. By asking for and then failing to analyse customer feedback, companies are unable to create a complete picture of their performance and their customers’ attitudes towards them. 1,000 pieces of feedback per month is a manageable number but human analysts are facing increasingly complex feedback which is not uniform, for instance a text message will use different language to a social media entry or a formal letter. 

“As companies strive to gain more customer insight, they will increasingly be faced with a growing amount of unmanageable data. This is where Rant & Rant can analyse the data and leave the actual higher value activity of recommending how to change a business to the human analyst.”