VOC or VOC?

It is all too easy making assumptions about terminology we use day-to-day.

Take "VOC" for example - to the CX world it's 'Voice of Customer', a catch-all description for all kinds of customer feedback, while the chemical industry knows it as 'Volatile Organic Compound'.

In every walk of life and business there are many words or phrases where their context is critical for accurate interpretation of what people are saying. The human brain is pretty good at automatically understanding context - text analytics technology, not always so much.

Sometimes this context is explicit - it's in the surrounding text. Other times the context is implicit, which is where things can get tricky for all forms of machine learning systems. In simple cases, context can often be derived from the source of the data or even a survey question which can provide clear enough context for the wording.

In other instances the implicit context is apparently absent, in what is referred to as the Missing Text Phenomenon (MTP). Humans compress the amount of information that needs to be included in language - leaving out stuff that can safely be expected to be known or implicitly understood by the listener. This amazing optimisation process has evolved over 200,000 years of human language development.

For example: "The window seat wants more dough balls". It is pretty clear that this means the people sitting in the window seat want a top-up on their starters, rather than the seat itself getting an appetite for tasty carbs.

Machines don't understand much of this 'Missing Text' in the language, and so will always have some black spots in their ability to achieve the correct context.

Fortunately, that's mostly a small level of error - but it will vary by subject domain, customer writing styles and the text analysis technology used.

But it does help to explain why text analytics technology will never be totally accurate. Be happy if it is accurate enough for what you need.

For a more detail on this, there is a great paper from Walid Saba here: https://thegradient.pub/machine-learning-wont-solve-the-natural-language-understanding-challenge/

#voc #cx #customerexperience #textanalysis #textanalytics #voiceofcustomer #customerinsight