One of the task within R&D is to understand current needs and anticipate future demands of customers in order to develop future proof concepts and products. To successfully complete this task, online user comments can be of great help as they often reflect the unbiased voice of the customer: likes and dislikes of product features become obvious, usability issues are revealed, and current market trends can be identified within user comments.

Nevertheless, there are certain challenges if you want to benefit from the online data treasure. First, you need to find out, on which platforms users talk about the product, trend or topic you would like to investigate. Second, you need to extract and cleanse the relevant data from which you expect to gain insights. Third, you need to evaluate the high amount of user comments in order to get a deep understanding of customer wishes and expectations. All three steps mentioned above require both an extensive technical expertise as well as a deep understanding, how results need to be prepared for R&D departments in order to gain insights that can be translated into actions.