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. Theclassical process of direct customer contact is time consuming and does not scale. In the past decade we have seen atremendous growth in digitally available textual sources in the form of emails or web-based data such as communities andalike. These large collections of unstructured content are containing relevant customer input, however, humans can only dealwith a limited amount of unstructured content in a given time. To address this problem, the concept of text mining has beenestablished to help humans processing large amounts of unstructured content. In this paper we present first results of a designscience research project. We have developed a text mining software artifact for extracting the voice of the customer fromunstructured content with the goal of supporting the product development process. The artifact has been piloted and evaluatedwithin a case study that we have carried out in cooperation with a large enterprise software company