TeamSupport Adds IBM Watson Sentiment Analysis to Its Customer Distress Index

TeamSupport recently announced the addition of IBM Watson-powered sentiment analysis to its Customer Distress Index (CDI), a tool for measuring customer dissatisfaction. By adding IBM Watson to the mix, the vendor aims to give support teams a more robust way to understand their customer relationships and, by extension, promote customer success.

The CDI provides companies with insight into potential customer dissatisfaction via information such as total number of tickets and average ticket resolution time. The integration of IBM Watson sentiment analysis enhances this insight with artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing, enabling teams to analyze customer communications such as email and chat responses.

“We’ve always been focused on the B2B world…and most of our customers are going to be B2B software technology or complex equipment providers, and understanding the health of their clients and the relationship they have with them is absolutely critical to their long-term success,” says Robert C. Johnson, CEO of TeamSupport. “The idea behind the CDI, going back to when we rolled it out a number of years ago, was to provide a numerical index which looked at the data we have in TeamSupport and try to measure the distress of the customer.”

Johnson notes that while the CDI has been a “very powerful” tool for TeamSupport’s clients, adding IBM Watson’s sentiment analysis capability will give companies even “more options of what data is important to them.”

“The CDI is very customizable; we have a lot of metrics—and now even more metrics—that we can look at on a relationship level, and we allow our customers to weight those to decide what is most important to them,” he says.