Social commerce solution Bazaarvoice just released a customer intelligence tool, an offering which aims to reveal insights from customer conversations (and customer sentiment) to drive decision making across the enterprise including for including sales, marketing, customer service, merchandising and product teams.

"To succeed, companies must get to ground truth about how products are perceived by different customer segments. Now they finally can," said Brett Hurt, Founder and CEO of Bazaarvoice. "For the first time in history, word of mouth is a structured, digitally archived medium that can be sliced, diced, integrated, and analyzed to deliver actionable insights that were never possible before. This is a tremendous opportunity, and it will change the way marketing and merchandising is done forever.”

The solution enables users to identify top promoters and detractors through "advocacy" and "influencer" ratings, and integrates with internal business data and CRM systems.

"Bazaarvoice Customer Intelligence allows 3M to proactively surface the customer motivations that drive our online community engagements, product by product, segment by segment," said Raj Rao, Global Director of Digital Marketing & eCommerce at 3M. "It is a tremendous asset across multiple brands and market channels, and we are learning new ways to connect with our customers."