Data mining can be a big business. And from the looks of things, more and more businesses are seeing the advantages of implementing such a thing.

Dissatisfied with the lack of real data and emotional content in a numerical customer satisfaction survey? If a ‘9’ on a 10-point scale is really good, what is an ‘8’? Is there information from that ‘8’ that could help you improve and how can you get to it?

The answer is called text mining, and it works just like the miners did during the gold rush. Text mining allows the user to extract more from a numerical survey by “mining” the verbatims for patterns in responses and linguistic concepts. Nowhere does text mining for customer satisfaction make more sense than in the hotel industry, especially when the hotel is a global brand such as Starwood Hotels & Resorts.

This Friday, Tom Anderson of Anderson Analytics (www.andersonanalytics), a leading market research consultancy, along with Girish Punj, Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Connecticut, and Rebecca Gillan, a SVP at Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. present their collaboration “Mining Text in Guest Satisfaction Surveys: Do Ratings Truly Reveal Future Intentions?” and speak further about this cutting-edge form of research. [Read the rest]