Finding Trends in Customer Feedback

"Have you ever sent an email to Microsoft, asking a question, suggesting a new feature, telling them about how you use their products? Millions of people read Microsoft Web sites every day, and many of them send emails. Do you wonder if anyone reads those emails?

Since there are only so many hours in the day, Microsoft employees have to struggle to keep up with the flood. Even though they want to read every email so that they can help their customers, they can't always achieve this goal.

Ben Martin and Olivier Ribet, who both worked for different groups within Microsoft.com in areas of customer connection, wanted a tool to make it easier to find out what customers were saying. Martin sent an email to Microsoft Research, asking if anyone had done work in text mining. Hang Li, a researcher from MSR Asia, answered him, and six weeks later they had a working prototype of a tool that could analyze text, identifying customer pain points, issues, and trends."

By Suzanne Ross, Microsoft Research ...