Businesses across every industry are achieving better results by harnessing the power of machine learning and natural language processing (NLP). Analyzing data from many different sources gives you deeper understanding to improve marketing and sales, operations, and your customer experience.

With unstructured data and NLP, you can put your data to work to uncover trends and behavioral patterns, areas for improvement, and missed opportunities.  It empowers your business to make better-informed, data-driven decisions.

What are unstructured data sources?

Think about what you can learn about customer behavior from mining call center notes, survey responses, in-store feedback, and social media. You can apply unstructured data analysis to any source of text that your organization captures. Even maintenance logs, corrective action reports, work orders, support tickets, and other operational databases can be rich sources of unstructured data.

Solving business challenges with unstructured data and NLP

Top 5 use cases

Here are five ways that using NLP and text mining of unstructured data can deliver the answers you need to solve your toughest business challenges.

1 – Gain a sharp edge over your competition

80-90% of data is unstructured and can be mined with NLP algorithms

Source: Webopedia.com

Up to 90% of data available to businesses is unstructured. That’s a wealth of data that could help you differentiate from the competition. Every company has data, but what can set you apart is your ability to uncover valuable insights from it.

With powerful new tools for data science, unstructured data is now more accessible to business and marketing analysts.

2 – Increase marketing effectiveness by better understanding customer sentiment

Unstructured data such as social media comments  help you gain insight into what consumers like and don’t like about your brand, products, and services. You can then target what to fix, what to sell, and who and how to engage for the best responses.

Machine learning  gives you added power to transform data into insights for highly tailored marketing. For instance, you can identify customer segments based on buying behaviors and preferences, enabling you to hone cross-sell and up-sell strategies.

3 – Accelerate productivity and innovation

When business processes are complex and involve multiple internal stakeholders, you may have a hard time getting to the root causes. At Beyond the Arc, we’ve helped clients streamline workflows by capturing insight using text mining of internal data and customer feedback. One speed bump to look out for is data quality. Up to 50% of employee time is wasted due to dealing with mundane data quality issues, according to MIT Sloan.

To efficiently deliver accurate and useful information, you need effective data management. This is true for any type of data, but unstructured data analysis can require additional data preparation and data cleansing.

4 – Reduce response time for issue resolution

Solving problems faster is key to improving customer experience. By closely tracking customer comments in social media, your business can quickly identify pain points and emerging issues for taking targeted action sooner. And with instant social feedback, you can act on opportunities earlier to exceed expectations and drive loyalty.

5 – Enhance fraud detection for claims

Is your business challenged with ensuring customer payment claims are legitimate? Unstructured data analytics can help you identify patterns of information or specific language that indicate the presence of fraud. By combining NLP algorithms and unstructured data analytics as you process forms, you can better identify legitimate claims for prompt attention. Any suspicious claims can be flagged for closer scrutiny.

Analyzing a seemingly endless sea of unstructured data may seem daunting. But with the right strategy and tools, uncovering insights becomes easier over time and well worth the effort.

Steven Ramirez, CEO of Beyond the Arc notes, “Unstructured data is an untapped resource for most organizations, mostly because it is perceived as being hard to work with. However, new tools for AI/ML enable everyone from business analysts to data scientists to conduct sophisticated unstructured data analysis.”

The more unstructured data you collect and analyze, the greater the opportunities for your business. You can leverage natural language processing and text analytics to transform your customer experience, your company culture, and your organization as a whole.

How Beyond the Arc can help you gain value with unstructured data and NLP

Beyond the Arc has resident experts in  data science and customer and employee journey analytics. We specialize in using statistics and machine learning, delivering actionable business insights to drive improvements.

Ready to learn more?  Let’s start a conversation >

Last updated: 8/5/2024