The Accelerator Group (TAG): Natural Language Processing

Friday, November 07, 2008

Now..... gain in market share is a survival imperative!

In times of recession and rapidly slowing consumer expenditure, relying on momentum in the market for maintaining profitability is no longer an option.
Even eCommerce - although it is predicted to take more share of retail sales - will see its rate of growth slow further.
So, gaining market share (a bigger share of shrinking wallets) is a business imperative.

This could be one of the main reasons why TAG backed company, Fizzback, is gaining such traction.
Fizzback provides a service to retailers and other service providers which elicits feedback - at the point of experience. Its a unique service in that it enables consumers to tell the retailer what they think about their products and service while they are in situ.
Its sophisticated artificial intelligence engine (using NLP, Natural Language Processing) interprets customers comments in free form and analyses these comments, presenting them to the company through a web dashboard.
The fiercely contested mobile industry has widely adopted the fizzback service to get really close to their customers eliciting feedback in real time.
Major retailers like Tesco, Marks $ Spencer, HMV and others are testing and rolling out Fizzback across their stores. Read Retail Week's article of last week on the subject.
Tesco are famous for having built one of the great retail business by listening intently to their customers and react.
The companies that emerge best from this recession will be those that get really close to their customers, listen well and react with speed to their requirements.

There are a number of services that provide on-line feedback but few that enable consumers in an offline environment to provide feedback via SMS, voice, email. Fizzback is one.

Awards are not certain indicators of success or even of great products but having a string of them clearly shows Fizzback is on the right track.