As I crisscross the country to visit our customers, partners, and prospects, it occurs to me how wonderfully diverse, yet similar in many ways, the Clarabridge customer base is.  Our clients come from different industries – from retail to hospitality to communications to technology to manufacturing.  They sell different products and services – from washer machines to computer software to pharmaceutical drugs.  They analyze varying sources of data – from call center notes to surveys to blogs.  But at the end of the day, they all are relentlessly focused on one thing: how to enhance the experiences of their customers.  All our customers want to understand better is what their customer’s value and what they don’t, so they can in turn make better business decisions. 

Today we announced the GA release of our 4.0 version. We’re excited about the new functionality in this release, but even more excited about the great collaboration with our customers and partners that occurred to bring it about. Almost every new feature in 4.0 was the result from a customer at some point saying “wouldn’t it be nice if I could do X...” Working with our customer steering committee of 10 of our largest and most vocal (in a good way) customers, we worked to decide which of these ideas would provide the biggest additional business value to the users of Clarabridge. 

One of the highlights in this new version is the ability for authorized end-users of Clarabridge to directly upload their own data into their system straight through their web browser. What we found working with many of our large enterprise customers is that while the bulk of their verbatim came from their CRM and survey systems, that are typically directly connected to the Clarabridge server, they would often have users who would...

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I recently read Lisa Barone’s blog entry about how companies shouldn’t “forgot about real customer service”  and it got me thinking. In this time of social media bandwagon hopping, are we forgetting the basics? I too, leapt on, but a recent customer experience leads me to to consider an example of a company that provides great customer experiences the old fashion way.It wasn’t always like this with Cox. I remember the dark days of Cox when I was in college. Then it was long waits, poor service, and rude employees. Well I have to hand it to them. They’ve changed dramatically. Now I happily pay Cox for phone, Internet, DVR and TV. Here are some of the things they seem to do exceptionally well.

With 6 million customers, Cox Communications, in my opinion, is a company that does a fantastic job implementing strong customer experience processes.It seems others agree with my experience judging from DSL report’s ranking of cable providers 

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I was watching the news this morning on Channel 4 (http://www.nbcwashington.com) as they talked about the latest controversy surrounding my beloved Redskins [Please no commments isn’t it painful enough having to watch them play]. Redskins linebacker Robert Henson posted the following Tweet after the game on Sunday, "All you fake half hearted Skins fan can .. I won't go there but I dislike you very strongly, don't come to Fed Ex to boo dim wits!!" (http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/news/story?id=4492151) . Joe Krebs implicitily made it a point while reading the Tweet and then explicitly stated the irony that since Henson did not use a comma between “boo” and “dim...

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I don't know if you've all seen this article from USA Today last week. It had some interesting insights: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-06-25-twitter-businesses-consumers_N.htm Basically the article profiled some very creative ways businesses are tapping into social media to get closer to their customers. The article recounted some well known stories (ie when Tweeters learned about a power outage during a Stanley Cup Playoffs game, or about how Dell, Comcast, and others are using Twitter to respond to customer complaints or advertise special sales). I think all these creative uses of Twitter are fascinating, and can create real value for customers (who now have a means of communicating directly to each other and to companies via a medium they prefer and are increasingly flocking to). From my vantage point looking at Twitter as a source for Customer Experience Intelligence, I still remain convinced...

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There's been a lot of discussion lately about the value that Twitter, Facebook, etc brings to companies looking for customer "insights" or customer "experiences" - the thought process is that if only companies could have a live feed to Twitter or Facebook data that they could keep a finger on the pulse of customer experiences, suggestions, issues, fix problems, and ultimately create a happier, more loyal, more profitable customer base.While there's value in social media tracking, I'm going to take a contrarian position. I believe that web/social media helps identify customer "perceptions" - but it does a poor job helping companies track real customer "experiences" - and thus the social media content is not a good place to track, measure improvements, and ultimately monitor customer experiences.Why is that, you might ask?1) the web is largely anonymous. If a person tweets "I'm sitting in Starbucks, my latte sucks" - you don't really know enough to fix the problem. Where is the customer? What store? Who served it?...

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I got a Google Voice account shortly after the service opened up to new subscribers. The service allows a user to establish a phone number that can follow you and ring your work, cell, home office, etc., according to rules as simple or as complex as you like, and the service lets you pick up, transfer, conference, or send a call to voicemail (even letting you "listen" to a call as a message is being recorded and cut in if you like, just like you used to do with the old fashioned tape answering machines). The most useful feature, in theory, is the free transcription service - once a message is recorded, Google does a speech-to-text transcription and forwards the message to your gmail account (or Google Voice phone client) for perusing so you can read it without listening. Here's the connection to customer experience intelligence - vendors like Clarabridge ingest customer feedback (from call centers, surveys, web sites, blogs, social media, etc) and the nirvana of customer experience applications for a...

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A few days ago Bruce Temkin, from Forrester research, dissected a report frequently deployed by Clarabridge customers called the "Negative Influence" report.

As stated in his blog: "The Clarabridge Negative Influence report correlates the negative experiences described in the open ended feedback (based on the specific categories of experiences that are described with accompanying negative sentiment) with a low score, and also weights the ranking of most negative influences based on frequency – how often a specific experience is most often associated with negative assessments."

Rather than reposting his blog - here's a link to the piece. There's some good commentary from readers following the blog that's also worth reading.

http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/tracking-your-top-10-dissatisfaction-drivers/