Attensity Integrates with Informatica, Offers DiscoverNow Cloud-Based Text Analytics Tool

Attensity has announced an integration with Informatica Cloud to power its DiscoverNow product, a text analytics solution that helps brands understand the conversations surrounding their products and services. According to Cary Fulbright, chief strategy officer at Attensity, the tool will equip organizations with more concise readings of customer sentiment, thus allowing them to improve customer retention rates and assess opportunities, or risks, as they present themselves.

The integration with Informatica enables Attensity to leverage the vendor's connection to a wide range of data sources, as well as to updates and additions they provide, Fulbright says. With the tool, users will be able to link with up to three different data sources, document repositories, CRM systems, or ERP systems. Data from these sources can be imported on a daily basis.  

Equipped with capabilities similar to Attensity's Analyze tool, DiscoverNow takes that product's on-premises linguistics tools and algorithms and offers them to end users via the cloud on an "easy, approachable user interface," Fulbright says. The solution processes internal corporate documents and texts from a variety of sources on the Web—including blogs, social media platforms, and forums— and uses natural language processing tools to determine customer sentiment.

A "major breakthrough" of DiscoverNow is its Intelligent Auto Categorization capability, which reduces the amount of manual labor required on the part of the end user, Fulbright says. The product gathers between 80 and 100 percent of documents and text messages that are generated on the Web and places them into a category based on ideas, keywords, events, patterns, themes, or concepts. "This compares to the industry norm of 20 percent," from competitors such as Medallia, Lexalytics, and Clarabridge,  Fulbright says.

The system can identify context by parsing sentences according to subject, noun, and object. It can be customized through the creation of rules based on language unique to a company, its products, and its industry, and is periodically updated with terms that are new to the language.

Fulbright notes a potential use: assessing sentiment behind Net Promotor Scores and other classes of numerical ratings. The problem with such ratings is that the numbers often have different connotations depending on the person, Fulbright suggests. While a customer might mark a company 6 to 8 on a scale of 10, the score may not accurately reflect the customer's true feelings. For this reason, many companies wish to get as much insight as possible.

For Attensity, the goal is to help give clients insight into what their customers are saying, the better to keep them. Such insight "is essential for building and maintaining strong customer relationships," said Howard Lau, CEO of Attensity, in a statement. 

Lyndsay Wise, research director at Enterprise Management Associates, agrees that such tools are becoming increasingly necessary as data amounts continue to grow. "Enterprises must implement technology platforms that empower users to quickly derive meaning from their corporate and social data," Wise says.

DiscoverNow is available now; pricing for the product is determined according to the number of documents or records accessed by a company over the course of a year. The lowest option is 15,000 documents or records a year, and the highest is 2.2 million, Fulbright says. 

Related Articles

Attensity Updates DiscoverCore

Attensity partners with Informatica and Tableau Software to deliver sophisticated analysis of unstructured data within existing business applications and workflows.

Satmetrix Launches NPX Customer Experience Management Software

Customer insight and sharing tools are at the heart of the new Satmetrix NPX.

Attensity Rolls Out Analytics Suite for Product Launches

The New Product Introduction solution lets marketers track online sentiment around new releases.