TellMi what the future holds!

Ping! Oh no! You know that feeling when you finally receive that all-important email you have been waiting for? Excited, but at the same time terrified to see what’s inside. My colleagues encourage me to open it and after barely having read the first sentence, I start shouting and jumping with joy. We did it! Our artificial intelligence project TellMi is now supported by VLAIO, the Flemish agency for innovation and entrepreneurship. Happiness all around the office! In line with 4C’s best practise, we celebrate this key milestone. After all our hard work, this is definitely deserved!

TellMi more! I am listening.

4C’s mission is to help you become a more customer centric company, rather than staying focussed on the product only. With our learn capabilities we help you by providing you customer insights that are driven by data and analytics. Companies are becoming more accessible through web forms, emails, customer surveys, chat functionalities, company apps and social media. Therefore, companies are collecting an increasing amount of text data from their customers. To become a customer centric company, it is important to have a 360° view of your customers and thus include the information hidden in these customer interactions.

This is why we started the project TellMi about 2 years ago. We built our own in-house AI platform, which we can customise to fit your specific needs, to extract insights from all manner of text data. Today we are able to automatically identify and process what your customers are trying to tell you or how they feel about the services you provide.

Many companies try to listen to their customers by, for example, sending out NPS or CSAT surveys. But are they actually understanding what their customers are saying? Putting your customer in the centre requires continuous attention for the information they are submitting in the open text fields of satisfaction surveys. Thanks to TellMi we can help you determine which pain points and recommendations you need to dive in first in order to increase your customer’s experience.

Excuse me, wablief, pardon?

When being a global company or operating in a multilingual country like for example Belgium, you face an additional challenge when it comes to text analysis because your clients will communicate with you in several languages. Today, it is standard practice to perform a text analysis per language. This is in contrast to any other analysis of your customers, which are usually based on numerical and categorical data. There you do not first divide them according to language, instead you analyse the entire customer base as a whole.

This is where TellMi will step in next! It will analyse all your text documents in different languages simultaneously, and not per language. Essentially, the aim of TellMi is to develop state-of-the-art cross-lingual text models. By doing this, we will preserve the size of the data set. And the more data, the better the results. It will also help extract information in the languages spoken by the smaller group of customers and, perhaps most importantly, it will create consistency across the different languages so that you can handle all your customers the same way.

Next to tackling the language matter, we will keep pushing the limits of data analytics in your business. Focussing on deep learning methodologies, we will extend today’s text models to extract even deeper and more actionable insights.

Bringing academic research to your business!

So why was I so nervous and excited about this email? Well, VLAIO’s support will bring this innovative project all the way to full fruition. We have started a collaboration with Prof. Dr. Marie-Francine Moens, the text mining guru at the KU Leuven, as well as become a part of the European ITEA3 labelled PAPUD (Profiling and Analysis Platform Using Deep Learning) project. By bringing the academic and business world together, the state of the art expertise developed at universities will come to businesses quicker. Something you and your customers will be able to benefit from.

Do you want to be a part of the exciting developments in artificial intelligence too? Let’s have a look at how AI can improve your business!