Website Planet interviewed Neticle, a company providing a series of enterprise solutions for sentiment and semantic text analysis.
We will look at how they managed to become a trusted partner of top brands, like Decathlon and Samsung, will get some insights in the recent AI trends, and then learn why semantics and sentiment analysis are a crucial addon to competition analysis tools in 2023.
Please, introduce Neticle to our audience. What is your story and mission?
The three founders (Zoltán Csikós, Róbert Horváth and Péter Szekeres) originally came up with the idea of Neticle at a party during their student years at Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary – and the next morning, it still seemed like something worth a try. Eventually, as fresh graduates in 2012, they founded the text and media analysis startup.
They now manage a company that is one of the fastest-growing B2B SaaS scale-ups in Hungary, providing text analytics solutions in 30 languages, mostly in the CEE and DACH region. Neticle’s clientele ranges from SMEs to large enterprises, as the company boosts business decisions with two major products. Neticle Media Intelligence is a smart social listening tool that collects and analyzes an enormous amount of publicly available online content – including the text’s underlying sentiments – in real-time. Another flagship product is Zurvey.io, a professional Customer Experience Data Platform to measure and process customer and employee experience automatically.
What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
One of the major inspirations was a study published in 2010 that showed how trends on Twitter often predicted the movements of the stock market. The founders also realized that providing solutions to businesses with a lot of textual data was something that they could be good at: they had the necessary tech knowledge and also really wanted to try their hands at building a startup.
Besides the two flagship products described previously, in 2019, Neticle’s portfolio expanded: the Text Analysis API and the Data API became available. These APIs allow a more versatile use of Neticle’s proprietary text analysis algorithm, as well as the possibility of embedding data streams into different platforms.
What are the problems that your tools help solve?
If a company needs to access insights from high amounts of textual data, Neticle’s products are a great solution. In such cases, manual analysis is usually too time consuming or even impossible, and could lead to inconsistent results. The textual data Neticle typically works with is either in the form of online mentions of a brand or product on social media and in the news, or it can be direct feedback from customers, for example through emails, surveys, or app reviews.
Neticle’s analysis can answer most questions that arise in businesses who want to understand the perception of their brand, or the pain and love points of their customers. After seeing the detailed analysis results and easy-to-understand visualizations, their business decisions become data-driven: they won’t need to rely on hunches anymore.
What makes you stand out from the competition?
It is our proprietary Natural Language Processing engine. It can analyze text with human precision in 30 languages, and can learn a new one in as little as 8 weeks. For many of the languages that it understands, it is the only available automatic text analysis solution.
Neticle also has its own unique index number called the Opinion Index, which shows in real time how online opinions change around a certain brand or product.
Can you share any recent success stories from your clients using Neticle?
One of our favorite stories is how MOL Limo, a popular car sharing service in Budapest, uses Zurvey.io to continuously measure client satisfaction through various communication channels, and provide a consistent positive customer experience. It’s essential that they keep a close eye on customer feedback, since they’re operating in a very rapidly developing industry, with constantly evolving competitors. You can read the full story on our website.
What are the benefits of sentiment analysis for marketers?
Sentiment analysis has become vital for marketers. With the help of it, they are able to understand not only if their audience is enjoying their product or campaign, but they can also connect the dots and see why. When sentiment analysis is paired with other kinds of data, important metrics immediately become visible: for example, marketers are able to see which platforms work in their favor – it’s not enough to have a lot of mentions somewhere, because they might all be totally negative. They see what kind of content is embraced by the audience, and what worked or didn’t work for their competitors. With the ratios of positive, neutral and negative mentions, social listening software can calculate your Net Sentiment Score, or pair positive and negative feedback with CSAT or Net Promoter Score data, which are important metrics in customer experience. Neticle’s software can even detect the eight basic emotions in text, and can draw up an emotion map of your campaign. The list goes on… I can hardly imagine social listening and CX without sentiment analysis anymore.
How will AI impact the future of your industry, and do you plan to use it?
Natural Language Processing, upon which our whole business is built, is itself a branch of AI. So we’re already using it, and as the use of AI is becoming more and more widespread, I think more people will realize the value of automated solutions like ours – and trust them. More advanced AI should be beneficial to our industry. We need to measure what AI tools can save us resources that we could instead spend on tasks that need more of a human touch. Also, I’d like to highlight the feeling of success that we can achieve by overcoming professional challenges – once we apply AI for all areas, that emotion can disappear. It should not, as this is the joy that enables brands and employees to grow, be creative and take pleasure in their jobs.
