A week ago I was in the MidWest demoing some of the newest capabilities from Enterprise 4; next week, I will be starting a journey that when complete will span 4 continents. Sometimes it feels like I’m in the George Clooney movie “Up in the Air,” well at least without the part where he fires people all day. But, THIS week shows the result of an even more remarkable journey –I’m here at our user conference, Clarabridge Customer Connections (C3) link in Orlando, FL.

We’re only a few weeks into the new year, but already it looks like there will be some interesting developments in the Text Analytics and Customer Experience Management markets that will likely affect Clarabridge, our customers and our partners.

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...

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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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