VT RAPTOR (Risk Assessment Process Tool for Online Reviews)

Virginia Tech’s Risk Assessment Process Tool for Online Reviews (VT RAPTOR) is an Excel-based tool for detecting safety concerns in online reviews. The tool uses only built-in Excel formula, with no external code or external data transfer, allowing the product safety practitioner to detect safety concerns without programming knowledge, and without sharing data over the web. The VT RAPTOR tool is also suitable for call transcripts, inbound emails, product return notes, live-chat session transcripts, social media mentions for your product, or other textual customer feedback. As long as the data is available in Excel format, VT RAPTOR can perform text-content-driven risk assessments.  

Some core features and capabilities of VT RAPTOR are:

• Evaluation of safety concern detection maturity of customer feedback collection and analysis processes;
• Extraction of safety concern mentions from customer feedback pasted into the spreadsheet;
• Score customer feedback to identify narratives with safety concerns, sort, and filter to narratives of highest concern;
• Visualization of risks:
•  View products on a Risk Assessment Matrix (RAM) and Risk Assessment Table (RAT) listed by severity, likelihood, and exposure scores computed from the safety concerns mentioned in the customer reviews of the product as well as from product circulation, product usage frequency, and product target audience and 
• View products by hazard type on a Risk Assessment Radar (RAR) chart, and drill-down to individual mentions of specific hazards, using the Product Risk Drill Down (PRiDD) table;
• Customize the thresholds and weights used for assessing product risk;
• Evaluate the productivity and reliability of human labelers;
• Compare the effectiveness of  automated scoring methods using a visual Lift Chart;
• Maintain a detailed log of the critical incidents that have been discovered and escalated; and
• Evaluate new smoke terms being considered against a gold standard dataset to determine if the new smoke term might result in false positives.

Virginia Tech is making this tool available for companies that want to evaluate their online reviews.  Contact the listed Licensing Contact for more information on how to request access to the program.