"Just about anything that's in text or can be converted into text," can be analyzed, says Matthew Brown, principal analyst for information and knowledge management at Forrester Research. Businesses in diverse fields including transportation, hospitality, business and consumer products, retail, entertainment and even law are beginning to embrace text analytics, Brown notes.

Text analytics tools also enable an enterprise to scour the digital grapevine to pinpoint budding problems that could tarnish a brand's luster, says Fern Halper, a partner at Hurwitz & Associates, a consulting and research firm. "The software helps companies understand what customers are saying about their brands, so they can actually get a head start in finding problems before they occur and make course corrections in midstream," Halper says.

For Internet travel giant Travelocity, that desire is keen, says Ginny Mahl, Travelocity's VP of customer care and sales. And every day, customers send the company plenty of content to examine, Mahl says. From North America alone, Travelocity each month receives some 25,000 to 30,000 customer satisfaction survey responses, 35,000 to 50,000 e-mails and 400,000 calls, she says.

To help sort through this digital haystack for insight needles, Travelocity turned to Attensity's text analytics tools. At press time, Travelocity was preparing to deploy a production version of the software. "We are using it primarily to read verbatim feedback from our customers to gain insight into likes and dislikes about Travelocity, and recommendations they have for improvements in our products and services," Mahl says.

"In particular, the application will let us do a much deeper dive into the root causes/drivers of the satisfaction scores we receive."

Mahl expects that the software will enable Travelocity to detect consumer sentiment trends that may impact customer satisfaction. Mahl offers an example: "Through a very simple query, we're able to 'read' our customer comments and find out if the amenity offerings at a particular hotel have changed, allowing us to update our website content more rapidly," she says. "This capability is one of those very simple things that can have a big impact on our customers' experience."

Text analytics also promises to help Travelocity bolster its partner relationships, Mahl says. "We [receive] supplier-specific feedback, which we can feed back to our partners so they also have a better understanding of our mutual customers' opinions," she says. "Sharing valuable customer information is in both of our best interests."

Travelocity, which first learned about text analytics from vendors who approached the company, evaluated several products, Mahl says. Two factors drove Travelocity toward Attensity, she says. "Attensity's solution lets us acquire an enterprise license for the software, which we can scale much more economically as we grow our application of text analytics to additional data or new data sets," Mahl says. "They were also able to provide a travel industry taxonomy to jump-start analysis."