3 Reasons Why Knowing Intent is Essential for Your Business

sasha uritsky

Jun 18, 2014

What is intent? It is the reason behind the sentences we say. Behind posts and messages, as they appear on social networks. For instance, the intent of the tweet ‘I am going to buy a new car soon, my old car is entirely broken’ is buying a new car. The intent of this one however ‘ Need to buy me a car, got things to do lol’ could be anything from killing time by posting randomly to impressing friends, but not buying a car.

During the time when most customer activities online happened on search engines (e.g. Google) understanding of intent was predominantly the task of these search engines. So when I type ‘typical menu of Chinese restaurant’ and the search engine displays the list of local Chinese restaurants clearly in this case it did not understand my intent.

Nowadays, when an ever growing part of the consumer related activities is happening on social networks the task of understanding the customer intent becomes responsibility of a business.

Here are three reasons why this task is essential:

1. Marketing is personalized. Email blasts are a thing from the past. Today to stay completive your business should be able to target individually. And that means knowing what each of your potential customers needs in real time. The best way to know this is to understand customer intent. The numerous analytical and measurement tools available today exist only because until recently we didn’t know how to capture customer intent properly.

2. Knowing intent allows efficient and timely service across your company’s departments: those interested in the product belong to marketing department, purchase intent goes to sales, unhappy customers go to customer service, and so on.

3. Knowing intent offers long-term sustainability to your business because it reduces the noise. Unlike the previous generations, when the problem was a lack of information, today’s problem is the abundance of information. Business can function efficiently and be sustainable only when a competent model of finding the right information is in place. Understanding of intent is the best model available

Interested in reading more? Check out our other blogs:

Amazing Social Data for Travel Companies

A huge number of travel related conversations is happening every day on social networks.

Based on nmodes Twitter data (averaged over 1.5 years of observations) there is

- 1 conversation every 15 minutes in which people notify that they are going to NYC;

- 1 conversation every 43 minutes in which people from the USA express intent to go to Europe;

- 1 conversation every 4 minutes with interest or intent to go on vacation;

- 1 conversation every 3 hours in which people are asking for hotel recommendations.

And this is just a tip of the iceberg.

(nmodes currently has 70+ travel-related topics and intents, and growing.)

For travel companies all these are qualified leads, potential customers, and attentive audience.

Reaching out to these potential customers results in a positive consumer experience, brand recognition, and, yes, sales!

The Curious Case of AI Technology

The notion of Artificial Intelligence has been around for a while.

Yet, unlike other prominent technological innovations such as electric cars or the processor speed, its progress has not been linear.

In fact, as far as industrial impact is concerned, there were times when allegedly there was no progress at all.

The widespread fascination with AI started several generations ago, in 80-s of the last century. This is when a pioneering work of Noam Chomsky on computational grammar led to a belief that human language capabilities in particular, and human intelligence in general, can be straightforwardly algorithmized. The expectation was that the AI-based programs will have a significant and lasting industrial impact.

But despite unabridged enthusiasm and significant amount of effort the practical results were minuscule. The main outcome was disappointment and AI become somewhat of a dirty word for the next 20 years. The research became mostly confined to scientific labs, and although some notable results have been achieved, such as development of neural networks and Deep Blue machine beating acting world champion in chess, the general community was largely unaffected.

The situation started to change about 5-10 years ago with a new wave of industrial research and development.

We now experience somewhat of a renaissance of AI with bots, semantic search, self-service systems, intelligent assistant programs like Siri are taking over. In addition, optimists of science are bragging confidently about reaching singularity during our lifetime.

The progress this time seems to be genuine indeed. There are indisputable breakthroughs, but even more impressive is the width of industries adopting AI solutions, from social networks to government services to robotics to consumer apps.

For the first time AI is expected to have a huge impact on the community in general.

There is this vibe around AI which hasn’t been felt in years. And with power comes responsibility, as they say, - prominent thinkers such as Stephen Hawking raised their voice against the dangers of powerful AI for humanity. Still, as far as current topic is concerned, this is all part of the vibe.

Despite all the plethora of upcoming opportunities, it is important to observe that we are yet to advance from anticipation stage. AI has not became a major industrial asset, an AI firm has not reached a unicorn status, and despite the fact that major industrial players such as IBM are pivoting towards fully-fledged AI-based model it has not manifested itself in business results.

We are still waiting for AI-based technology to disrupt the global community.

The overall expectation is that it is about to happen. But it hasn’t happened yet.