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Attensity

Company: Attensity, Palo Alto, CA
Entry Submitted By: Sterling PR
Company Description: Attensity provides the definitive Voice of the Customer platform built on its text analytics software technology for transforming unstructured customer feedback into actionable First Person Intelligence™. Founded in 2000, the company is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif., with a technology center in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Nomination Category: Products & Product Management Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best New Product or Service - Computer Software

Nomination Title: Attensity Voice of the Customer Solution


  1. Tell the story about this nominated product or service (up to 500 words). Describe its function, features, benefits, and sales to date. You may include hyperlinks to product photos and data sheets. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

    Attensity’s Voice of the Customer (VoC) solution employs the company’s patented
    Exhaustive Extraction™ technology to transform unstructured customer feedback
    into actionable First Person Intelligence™. It automatically identifies facts,
    opinions, requests, trends, and trouble spots from the unstructured text of
    surveys, service notes, emails, web forums, blogs and other customer communications.

    Often, information collected from customers is not used at all. The only
    available means most companies have to understand unstructured data is to have
    humans read it. While no computer will likely equal the human intellect’s
    ability to comprehend text written by customers, humans are poorly suited to
    read thousands or millions of text records to find facts, track trends and
    discover dangers.

    Unlike programs that require manual tagging, sorting, classifying or other
    upfront effort, Attensity VoC automatically extracts valuable data from written
    feedback to provide analysts and managers deeper insights into customer
    satisfaction, sentiment and loyalty. Attensity VoC also reveals specific product
    and service issues, reactions to marketing and public relations efforts, and
    even buying signals.

    At the core of the Attensity VoC solution are Attensity’s patented extraction
    engines, which mine and transform various forms of unstructured information into
    a structured form. The solution then creates output in XML or in a structured
    relational data format. This output is fused with existing structured data and
    made a part of the company data warehouse or data mart. The newly structured
    data then can be accessed, analyzed and acted on by various departments to drive
    customer-focused business objectives.

    Attensity’s extraction engines offer a comprehensive approach to transforming
    text into structured data for analysis. Attensity’s extraction technology
    includes search, statistical, and linguistic approaches to analyze the voice of
    the customer. Feedback analysts can use Attensity search technology to test
    hunches and rapidly find information about known issues in text; understand the
    general occurrence and magnitude of issues; and they can use Attensity’s
    patented linguistic approach to gain a rich, actionable understanding of feedback.

    Attensity’s natural language approach uniquely identifies meaning and emotion
    expressed by a customer. Attensity VoC includes a unique capability to
    understand and correctly analyze a wide range of voices that a customer
    typically uses in colloquial language. For example, “I am happy” is positive
    voice, “I would be happy if you provided me a refund” is indefinite voice and
    “the customer isn’t happy” is negative voice. Attensity’s approach automatically
    understands and provides analysis on text that contains these specific ways of
    expressing feedback.

    Rather than force users to find problems themselves, Attensity VoC also features
    alerts, which can be easily programmed to immediately inform the appropriate
    personnel when new issues arise, when known issues reach a critical point, or
    when outliers are found in the analyzed text.

    Attensity VoC has already been implemented by several major corporations, such
    Travelocity, Whirlpool and JetBlue, and is also used by government call centers,
    such as Medicare. Attensity VoC is available directly from Attensity as well as
    Teradata, IBM, HP and other solution providers.

    http://www.attensity.com/solutions/voice_of_the_customer.php
    http://www.attensity.com/pdf/pdf_grabber.php?id=attensity_voice_of_customer.pdf

  2. List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, product reviews, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

    http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120129801401017897.html?mod=%28_pageid_%29_leftbox
    http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7661
    http://www.destinationcrm.com/articles/default.asp?ArticleID=7721
    http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=
    9046938&source=NLT_AM&nlid=1

    http://www.kmworld.com/Articles/ReadArticle.aspx?ArticleID=40498&PageNum=2
    http://www.the451group.com/mis/451_mis.php?sector_focus=10&report_focus=&deep=yes
    http://fbhalper.wordpress.com/2008/02/26/hear-my-voice/
    http://www.intelligententerprise.com/channels/business_intelligence/showArticle.jhtml?artic
    leID=206900479&cid=RSSfeed_IE_News

    http://www.attensity.com/news_events/press_releases/061107.php
    http://www.attensity.com/news_events/press_releases/111207.php
    http://www.attensity.com/news_events/press_releases/022508.php
    http://www.attensity.com/news_events/press_releases/022708.php

  3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader(s) of the team that developed this nominated product or service:

    David Bean co-founded Attensity in 2000, and is currently its chief technology
    officer. Prior to Attensity, he was an IS director and consultant in the
    healthcare industry. David has also been a research assistant and guest lecturer
    in engineering and linguistics departments. He has six patents to his name with
    six more pending. David received a B.A. in French and Arabic from the University
    of Utah, and an M.S. in Management Information Systems from the University of
    Arizona School of Business. He has a doctorate in computer science from the
    University of Utah where he is currently an adjunct professor.