ABSTRACT
Recently there has been a huge influx in the creation, storage, and accessibility of textual consumer information resulting in challenging opportunities for database marketing analysts in academia and business. Three main circumstances are identified in which textual customer information is produced and could help to deliver better customer knowledge and insights. First, companies are shifting from traditional consumer contact methods such as telephone or letters, to more advanced online ways of communicating and interacting with their customers such as emails, online helpdesks/question forms, third-party customer contact solutions (for example, https://feefo.com) or 24/7 chat boxes. This individual traceable client/company interaction information could help to deliver valuable insights in explaining customers’ behavior. Second, the popularity of mass online user-generated content mechanisms in the form of social media environments like Twitter, Tripadvisor, Rottentomatoes, and so on, where consumers post their opinions and thoughts about the company’s product or services, delivers new challenges to marketing managers nowadays. Third, traditional offline marketing research by paper and pen and face-2-face interviews shifted toward online surveying at the beginning of this century, after which it moved toward an online (n)ethnography-based research environment where customers are put together for a longer period in an online community in which different topics are discussed. Community-based research regularly results in a tremendous amount of textual information that has to be analyzed at the end of each research session.
