A Text Mining Application for Exploring the Voice of the Customer

Involving customers into the development process is a well-known best practice for creating successful products. The classical process of direct customer contact is time consuming and does not scale. In the past decade we have seen a tremendous growth in digitally available textual sources in the form of emails or web-based data such as communities and alike. These large collections of unstructured content are containing relevant customer input, however, humans can only deal with a limited amount of unstructured content in a given time. To address this problem, the concept of text mining has been established to help humans processing large amounts of unstructured content. In this paper we present first results of a design science research project. We have developed a text mining software artifact for extracting the voice of the customer from unstructured content with the goal of supporting the product development process. The artifact has been piloted and evaluated within a case study that we have carried out in cooperation with a large enterprise software company.