With the Text Analytics Summit about to get underway, we’re seeing a wave of vendor announcements hit, such as Clarabridge’s news earlier this week. SAS also said today that it’s introduced Industry Taxonomy Rules starter kits, prebuilt add-ons to SAS Enterprise Content Categorization for speeding text analytics implementation efforts. Also on the agenda: Attensity’s announcement of Analyze 6 and its latest vertical out-of-the-box analytics capabilities, aimed at the retail banking industry.

The focus for Analyze 6 was to take the key capabilities of Attensity’s core engine and use that to put text analytics on the desktops of business users who want to understand and respond to customer data – at the speed of social media, which means without waiting for IT experts to create reports for them. “The thing about social media and customer data is it is like a tidal wave,” Attensity CMO Michelle de Haaff says.

Building on its Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Platform Data Grid computing system for helping enterprises quickly analyze large-scale data sets, end users can select from over 100 report templates (with multiple kinds of analytics for each), or they can choose what questions to ask through its new Exploration environment. Basically, that’s a wizard-based way to drill deeper into a category set, leveraging Attensity’s pre-defined semantic classes tailored for each specific vertical industry rather than having to predefine taxonomies themselves to look at data.

Among other features the software has incorporated, according to de Haaff, are visualizations of the data (multiple chart formats, tabular reports, tag clouds, and so on). “If there is kind of analytics or data you want to look at, you should have chart that helps you – that is our goal,” she says. Other ways to understand what’s being said in social media are accommodated by hotspots, a measure of the significance of a change in a data value from one time period to another, which might require further analytical exploration or quick online engagement with customers. “We do Six Sigma-based calculations to look at trends happening and changes in them to determine if a new or existing trend is now creating problems in your market,” she says.

It’s also including customer profiling in this version. “Customers can be very specific and detailed when posting a review or giving a comment or sharing an opinion. So we augment the profiles of individual customers and leverage that to help companies determine who to engage with and how,” she says. “Because of our semantic understanding of data we can attach to an individual insights about that individual.” Knowing what individuals own or use also can make it easier for a company to conduct customer service or marketing efforts, but Attensity adheres to opt-in and customer interaction rules to respect individuals’ privacy boundaries, de Haaff says.

As social media has continued to grow, it’s also created deeper working relationships between departments like marketing and customer service, she says. After all, if customers are complaining loudly about a problem with a product, marketing needs to know that before it starts a big social media campaign. So the latest version also is making it easier to share dashboards of reports (or restrict them as required), by turning them into analytics into PDFs, Powerpoints, or Excel documents that can be emailed around to colleagues or even high-level business execs for quick insight.

Retail banking is the second vertical industry Attensity has tackled (telco was first), applying to millions of banking conversations online its semantic understanding of their contents, and coming up with the pre- packaged analytics, taxonomies, and entity trees with  terms specific to the financial services space.  “We built the engine to be sensitive to them and delivered out-of-the-box analytics for that industry, including competitive intelligence,” she says. Its Attensity Respond, which creates queues for business users to traffic-cop the marketing and customer service sides of social media engagement, now is sensitive to banking industry semantics, as well.

When it comes to social media, accuracy in understanding conversations matters a great deal, de Haaff says. “People are taking action now. You can’t route a conversation to a social media responder and be wrong. You can’t recommend or even deliver action into a CRM system if you’re wrong,” she says. “So our deep semantic understanding and patented engines are very important.”