Leximancer, a Customer Experience Management (CEM) and analytics software development company, recently announced the launch of The Customer Insight Portal, a SaaS offering that delivers insight to not only what customers are saying, but why they’re saying it. This is a topic I am very interested in as I have been looking into this space a bit. I spoke with Chris Westfall, the VP of Business Development at Leximancer last week. Chris said that the Customer Insight Portal was launched both as a stand-alone solution and to generate awareness of Leximancer software which they are offering on an OEM basis.

The science supporting Leximancer was developed at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. Development is still done primarily in Australia but the main marketing arm is now in the US. Leximancer takes multiple steps beyond traditional text analytics to provide actionable insight into nearly any text based document (Word, PDF, HTML, Excel, etc.) with no prior set up. It is language independent, and provides a root cause analysis allowing companies to determine not just what people think of them, but also why.

The Customer Insight Portal provides insight without the need for set up, which means that analysis is provided without previous knowledge of the information under investigation. Users of the Customer Insight Portal can upload the data and the analysis runs within minutes. Because there is no selection of terms before getting started the results are unbiased. As Chris said, this is about finding the unknown-unknowns — those moments where you find connections you had no idea were there. Chris said it is not a search tool for content sources but a text analytics tool. You need to specify the target content sources, then it tells you what is going on within them. You can frontend the Customer Insight Portal with a tool like Filtrbox (see Create Web Monitoring Filters with Filtrbox) to help find target content.

Chris showed me an example from looking at four food review sites, Yelp!, covering Dunkin Donuts Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and Washington. We could see that the responses to Dunkin Donuts in Boston were different from the other cities. As a Boston native, I am not surprised as it is very popular here. We saw that the term “lines” were more connected to Boston but looking into what people said, they spoke of the lines in positive terms. The coffee theme and position of comments to locations offers insights that could be acted on. You can see a screen shot of this analysis below. This particular screen shot also shows the use of tags to indicate variation in comments between different cities.

I asked Chris to do an analysis of the Fast Forward blog so we could explore more familiar content. We looked at the terms web 2.0 and enterprise 2.0. The results were retuned while we spoke. Here is the map for Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 from Fast Forward.

Here is a drill down on that screen so you see more details.

Here is an exploration of the concept of web and mashups—with specific text segments as evidence n the right side. This allows you to get right at what was said.

Seen below is the pathway analysis through the Customer Insight Portal to understand relationship between integration and mashups. What’s nice here, is that you can see that the example text segment for “integrate” doesn’t mention integration directly. This speaks to the power of the science at work ‘under the covers.’ The Customer Insight Portal examined the blog and found terminology that implies integration, so the term did not have to be present.

I think there is great promise for this type of tool. As I mentioned at the start, Leximancer is primarily looking to OEM their text analytic tools. It will be interesting to see what applications emerge. There is also a Leximancer blog to follow what they are doing.