A large sports apparel and footwear manufacturer was collecting more than one million customer responses per month. The company asked customers their opinions about the products and services in nearly every transaction. Feedback, in the form of structured data and unstructured, verbatim text comments, was captured from the company’s website, in-store surveys, call centers, and e-mail surveys.
The company collected real-time information to understand customer sentiment and to calculate the Net Promoter Score. The Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric that is derived by asking customers how likely they are to recommend the company to a friend or colleague. Usually, the feedback consists of text comments.
The apparel company wanted to use this “voice-of-the-customer” data to quickly identify and respond to problems, improve the performance of internal operations, strengthen brand positioning and messaging, and enhance the brand image. However, with more than a million comments per month, the volume of customer comments was far too large to manually read and analyze.









