If the deployment at Gaylord Hotels is any indication, text analytics has emerged from the rarefied domain of military intelligence and life sciences research and is gaining mainstream business use. With 1,400- and 1,500-room hotels in Orlando and Dallas and its well-known, 2,800-room mega hotel at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Gaylord needed a better, faster way to "read" customer satisfaction surveys. Within six months (from pilot to production rollout), Gaylord replaced a slow, third-party service with an in-house analytics app that delivers overnight results through guest satisfaction dashboards and ad hoc reports.
Gaylord's pursuit of text mining began in late 2006 when executive Tony Bodoh investigated analytics as a way to scan thousand of RFPs and contracts to get a better sense of what meeting planners were looking for. When Bodoh was promoted to manager of operations analysis in April 2007, he pushed for an even broader deployment.
"We were evaluating text analytics vendors when I took over guest satisfaction, and I quickly realized that the technology presented a big opportunity," he explains. "By late June we signed a contract with a [vendor] to help us with a pilot project to examine two-and-a-half years' worth of guest satisfaction comments."
Source: Intelligent Enterprise, http://www.intelligententerprise.com