The Workshops • Sunday, February 24, 2008

2:00 pm- 5:00 pm Linkage Analysis: Painting the Big Picture with Numbers

Understanding and Applying a Disciplined Process for Linking Employee, Operational, Customer, and Financial Data

Kunal Gupta, Ph.D., Vice President/Senior Consultant, Decision Sciences, BURKE, INC.

Jaci Jarrett Masztal, Ph.D., Vice President/Practice Leader: Employee Engagement & Retention Management, BURKE, INC.

Over the last few years, linkage analyses have added significant value to measurement programs across organizations. The ability of such analyses to link measures of employee and customer feedback to indicators of business success has earned greater visibility for these programs at the executive level. At the same time, the ability to link other important internal data, e.g. operational data, to employee and customer measures has allowed decision-makers to better collaborate across organizational silos in selecting action plans that can optimize their investments to improve financial success.

In this highly interactive workshop, we share some powerful case studies of organizations that have undertaken a successful journey of linking employee, process, customer and financial data. Some of these studies will focus on specific organizational units such as "call centers," while others would focus at a more strategic organization-wide level. We will use our collective experience across industries, in business as well as consumer environments, to identify the critical success factors associated with success, or lack thereof, along the linkage journey. Any organization that is attempting to undertake linkage analyses, or one that has not been successful in the past with such projects, will be able to learn from the findings shared in the session.

Overall, the session will focus on four key themes:

2:00 pm- 5:00 pm Using Text Analytics to Listen to Customers on Their Terms: Deciphering the Unstructured Data to Discover Real Meaning

Manya Mayes, World Wide Text Miner Strategist, SAS INSTITUTE

Mary Grace Crissey, Analytics Marketing Manager, SAS INSTITUTE

As more channels emerge for collecting electronic data, the demand for analyzing legacy traditional databases with text-based unstructured sources is growing. This workshop will demonstrate how emerging technology can automate the "reading" and the "hearing" of customer comments. This software tutorial will show how data collected across a many sources can be explored, transformed, and processed into clusters so that you can generate insightful reports using SAS Text Miner. A case study of Audio analysis based on voice data captured in call centers will be presented followed by a discussion of several real world success stories.

Overview of Text Analytics

Demonstration of SAS Text Miner technology

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