Microsoft buys social listening tech for CRM system

Netbreeze uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), data mining and semantic text analysis to provide sentiment analysis for 28 different writing systems including German, English, French, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Japanese, Traditional Chinese or Mandarin.

Microsoft corporate vice president Bob Stutz said: “This is a huge benefit over competing solutions that translate to a common language then analyse sentiment from there.”

Stutz said Microsoft plans to make Netbreeze’s technology available across its customers’ marketing, sales and service teams “so that each and every person using your CRM system can have this consumer insight at their fingertips”.  

“Delivering these capabilities is a critical part of our social strategy,” Stutz added. “We think social capabilities need to be a natural part of the tools you use every day. We think you can get more done if social insights surface within your account records, if you can communicate with your social network within the context of an opportunity, if you can understand the influence of someone calling into your customer care department before you prioritise their call.”