Clarabridge Blog

With the exception of the Tiger Woods debacle, President Obama’s health care reform is the most talked about issue in our country today. And it should be, as it is going to affect all U.S citizens in one form or another – for better or worse. The discussions (or debates) about the reform plan not only rage on in Congress and on national news channels by experts in the field -- but also among us regular ol’ citizens. And we’re not just discussing it at home with our families and friends, we’re discussing it online and we’re tweeting and face-booking about it.

Trade-offs are a part of life. I, for instance, used to only eat half of the Oreos® in the cookie packs in our break room. I’d rather do that than put extra time on a treadmill. In classification, there is an inherent trade-off between Recall and Precision, and I’d like to provide some background on those terms and on why the trade-off occurs.

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...

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 

...

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...

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...

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?...