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:

Send Us Your Travel/Hospitality Business Pitch

nmodes is a data analytics company. We analyse data based on consumer intent. We’re pretty good at it.

We spend a significant portion of our processing resources on analysing travel data. And so we are fast to know when somebody is planning a trip, or looking for a place to stay, or visiting your city and searching for activities, restaurants, entertainment.

In addition to data processing we help businesses in monetizing the data we deliver them. We create and implement the marketing strategy to convert intent-driven consumer data into your sales. Typically the majority of the data comes from social web, and consequently a successful marketing strategy has an important benefit of establishing long-term social presence for your business.

We also offer free end user services. Knowing consumer intent gives us capability to identify in real-time social users in need of travel help. Our data is actionable, allowing to respond momentarily to individuals with timely recommendations and advice.

Knowing consumer intent in real-time gives business power to control the sales process. Your customer satisfaction will improve, and your sales will grow significantly.

And if you are not ready to start using our full service, you can always send us a short description of your business, its value, and how it is better from competition. We will be happy to connect consumers with your product when appropriate. No commitment on your part is required.

Intent-driven data offers instant value, start enjoying it.

Beware the lure of crowdsourced data

Crowdsourced data can often be inconsistent, messy or downright wrong

We all like something for nothing, that’s why open source software is so popular. (It’s also why the Pirate Bay exists). But sometimes things that seem too good to be true are just that.

Repustate is in the text analytics game which means we needs lots and lots of data to model certain characteristics of written text. We need common words, grammar constructs, human-annotated corpora of text etc. to make our various language models work as quickly and as well as they do.

We recently embarked on the next phase of our text analytics adventure: semantic analysis. Semantic analysis the process of taking arbitrary text and assigning meaning to the individual, relevant components. For example, being able to identify “apple” as a fruit in the sentence “I went apple picking yesterday” but to identify “Apple’ the company when saying “I can’t wait for the new Apple product announcement” (note: even though I used title case for the latter example, casing should not matter)