Driving to our cottage each summer we pass through an old mining town. The mine and smelter have long since been shuttered but the mounds of slag, waste from the smelting process, stretch for miles. Today, that waste is being transformed into fire resistant building materials.

Most enterprises are sitting on their own pile of slag; a massive reservoir of Free text customer data buried deep inside their CRM systems. For years sales reps have been logging call notes, customer comments and insights creating terabytes of unstructured Free-text data and like that slag pile this “waste” is a huge strategic asset.  Here’s why…

Reviewing customer comments has always been useful but no human is capable of scanning terabytes of data to understand the market as a whole.  This is where AI changes everything.  Large language models (LLMs) can scrutinize hundreds of thousands of Free-text data inputs teasing out customer sentiments.  Instructed properly, AI can identify themes and group customers by similar needs.  AI models can also extract how customers perceive your products vs your competitors’ and determine what they value most.   What were unconsolidated Free-text notes suddenly become structured, market intelligence … and a huge competitive advantage!

By organizing and scoring unstructured Free-text data, AI is able to create a bird’s eye view of the market akin to a Treasure Map showing the direction your market wants to go and even the route it’s considering.  On this Treasure Map, you can also clearly identify the customer segments and needs, meaning strategies from R&D to product messaging can be better targeted.  Additionally, with the competitive landscape clearly illustrated, high level strategic planning can now be rooted in facts rather than educated guesswork.  All this constructed from data you already own!

More magic happens when you plot the insights over months or years.  A time stamped Perceptual map or Sankey chart reveals how customer segments shift over time so you can see which customer segments are drifting toward a competitor and which are becoming increasingly loyal.   These Treasure maps also show how customer priorities are shifting over time and can identify early “customer switch” signals – those signals customer groups send out before switching to a new product or service.

Creating an AI powered “Treasure Map” from free-text data allows you to:

• Understand the emotional and functional drivers behind customer purchases
• Compare customer perceptions of your product vs. competitors
• Spot early warning signs of switching behavior
• See the market in aggregate — not just one customer at a time
• Identify segments based on distinguishable customer needs, not guesswork

Run the analysis regularly and you gain near real time visibility into market sentiment.   By doing so sales and marketing teams can determine when to engage key customers, while the strategy team can adjust long term plans with confidence.

You don’t need new data nor a new system.  You simply need to unlock the information in all that Free-text data you already own sitting idly on your servers.  Companies spend millions chasing new data sources while ignoring the treasure buried in their own CRM database.  AI gives you the tools to extract that data, organize it, and turn it into a

Image credit: Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images