IIeX NA 2019 Conference Series – Tom Anderson – OdinAnswers

Happy Market Research Podcast

Welcome to the 2019 IIEX North America Conference Series. Recorded live in Austin, this series is bringing interviews straight to you from exhibitors and speakers at this year’s event. In this interview, host Jamin Brazil interviews Tom Anderson, Founder, Executive Chairman & CRO at OdinAnswers.

Contact Tom Online:

LinkedIn

OdinAnswers

[00:00]

Tom Anderson, OdinAnswers is the name of his company; OdinTexts was prior to the IIeX event. Huge fan of this guy. He and I co-presented at a few different events: the CEO Summit a few years ago is probably the most recent. Tell you what: I consider him to be the father of text analytics in this space. He has this interesting point of view about how we should be triangulating truth based on multiple data sources, including KPIs and customer voice. Enjoy the episode.

[00:30]

Here with Tom Anderson, OdinAnswers is the new name of your company, sir. We’re live at IIeX in Austin. How are you?

[00:39]

Great. Thanks for having me.

[00:41]

Yeah, of course. It’s an honor to have you. You’ve been the pioneer, I think, in this space. I can’t think of another company anyway as it relates with text analytics. Talk to me a little bit about OdinTexts, now OdinAnswers, and that journey.

[00:53]

Well, from the get-go, we were very much about realizing that good text, interesting text data never lives in isolation. There’s always important structured data accompanying it. Twitter might be a little bit of an exception, but pretty much all other interesting data has very valuable structured components. So, that was our thinking from the get-go in the patents and so forth that I filed. But now we’re taking that to the next level. We’ve been working with a lot of cutting-edge, digital-first clients and really looking at more and more data, so connecting different data types and variables to really get to what an answer is. And that’s what’s reflected in the company: really trying to combine and think about the topics that people talk about in their own voice, unaided, what’s most important to them (thoughts and feelings) together with who it is, all the segmentation-type variables. And then the third part is the KPI. And so, some of our clients, for that, it’s return behavior, clicks on a link, or revenue is the holy grail. But, for others, it might be MPS or customer sat. And then, there’s always, of course, emotions and sentiment to fall back on in the events where there aren’t important KPIs.

[02:17]

We’ve evolved as an industry, right, because you were around before AWS, well before.

[02:21]

Yeah.

[02:22]

So, I mean you’ve seen a lot of new tech that’s been entering this space here, specifically in the way of text analytics. And you guys have rebranded, which I think was a brilliant... I love OdinAnswers; I think that’s such an action-oriented framework versus OdinTexts now. Not to say that there’s anything wrong with that. I think it’s just modernization and change of what the customer really needs right now. How are you helping customers like... Let’s pick on NPS ‘cause it’s a super common use case, right? So, how are you interacting with that data to add that value to the customer.

[02:58]

So, NPS, a lot of clients can add a lot of data from other sources. So, what they have internally first and foremost might be CRM or data on how much these customers have purchased, how frequently they purchase, what they purchase, that type of thing. And then, of course, you can go beyond that to other data as well. But that is one of the things we’ve been working hard on and continuing to move in that direction.

[03:28]

Got it.

[03:29]

And in terms of the industry overall, yeah, I mean there’s been... I think there’s a new (definitely don’t want to call it a bubble because I believe it’s absolutely... it’s sort of finally the time of text analytics,