Confirmit, one of the world’s leading SaaS vendors for multichannel Voice of the Customer, employee feedback, and market research applications, has acquired Integrasco, a leader in social intelligence and text analytics.
The acquisition follows Confirmit’s previous acquisitions of CustomerSat in 2012, Techneos in 2011, and Pulse Train in 2007. The acquisition brings advanced technologies for capturing social insights and analyzing unstructured text into the Confirmit portfolio of software offerings.
Integrasco is a leader in analytical technology solutions and has helped many blue-chip companies track the performance of their brands, products and services across social media, traditional media and customer channels to extract significant commercial value from mining unstructured text and insights.
Confirmit plans to release the Integrasco technology integrated with its Confirmit Horizons version 18 software in Q2 2014.
Terry Lawlor, EVP Product Management, Confirmit told Loyalty360 that the main drivers behind Confirmit’s acquisition of Integrasco are to address the needs of the market and continue to enhance its comprehensive set of products and services that address the evolving needs of all customers.
“There is an increasingly diverse array of information sources that provide insight into your customers, and with Integrasco, Confirmit can tightly integrate sophisticated social intelligence and text analytics into its already feature-rich, multi-channel voice-of-the-customer (VoC), employee engagement and market research platform,” Lawlor explained. “Confirmit has a long-term commitment to enable businesses to succeed by providing intelligence-driven solutions that deliver insight and business change. The acquisitions of Pulse Train, Techneos, CustomerSat and now Integrasco demonstrate that commitment and Confirmit will continue with this strategy to continually expand our capabilities.”
Customers will be able to take full advantage of textual feedback from almost any data source, including social media, enabling them to keep pace with the rapid growth of this type of data and achieve greater competitive advantage, Lawlor added.
For example, Lawlor said text analytics can uncover insights from open-ended text responses in surveys or in customer service interactions that would otherwise remain hidden.
“This is valuable information that, if acted on quickly, can deliver significant competitive advantage,” he said. “Social media is a valuable source of customer, market, and competitive intelligence. With the powerful analytics provided by Integrasco, our customers can gain valuable new insight from all the different social channels. They will also be able to gain a holistic view across all customer feedback channels via our powerful, in-platform reporting suite.”
Unstructured data sources have always posed challenge and opportunity for companies, Lawlor added.
“Text-based, unstructured data sources, such as email, social media, verbatim survey responses and other free-form text, account for around 80% of collected business data,” he said. “However, due to ineffective and cumbersome manual processes required for interpreting results, these sources are often omitted from analyses.”
Lawlor said the combination of Integrasco’s products and services with Confirmit Horizons allows companies to extract commercial value and analytical insights from unstructured text.
“Text can be retrieved from a range of customer systems as well as companies’ existing Confirmit feedback and research programs,” he added. “With this insight, organizations can identify key issues and trends from different channels and various geographies to generate significant ROI.”