Clarabridge Blog

Welcome to the first in a series of conversations on customer experience management with thought leaders across a variety of sectors. This series will focus on the different approaches and practices companies have with regards to capturing the “voice of the customer”. We hope that you’ll find these conversations useful, and that they might spark dialogues within your own organization on how you can engage and listen to your customers better and use those insights to improve your product/service offerings and operations to avoid crises and perhaps even identify new opportunities for generating revenues. Our first conversation is with Debbie Tsusaki, Sr. Director of Operations and Planning for Choice Hotels.

It's been a while since I worked as a registered nurse, but healthcare continues to be one of my passions. My night table is filled with books and magazines on the subject and you can bet my off-hours web-surfing includes a search or two about new breakthroughs in health and patient care. My interest has only intensified in light of the recent healthcare reform debate. (See our separate blog entry, “Capturing the Voice-of-the-Country Regarding Health Care Reform”.

A couple of years ago, Clarabridge wrote a white paper about three major trends that are speeding up the adoption of text analytics.  To be honest, I've been fascinated by the rapid pace at which this adoption has played out.

Talk about a tasty win-win—we just announced that Wendy’s® International has selected Clarabridge to automate their customer feedback program.  With our text analytics solution, Wendy’s will be able to gather and analyze critical customer information in just minutes.

Today is a very exciting day for us at Clarabridge, we have just announced the launch of the beta of our Self Service text analytics offering! Self Service is a great way to get started with text analytics.  Although we have some of the best sales and professional services people in the world, sometimes you just want to try something out on your own, or perhaps your project or company is too small to justify a standard software evaluation process.

Clarabridge had the pleasure of participating in 2 very different social media events recently. Today, we attended the NVTC Social Media Committee event], a lively panel made up of  experts from Network Solutions, USATODAY.com, Novak Biddle Venture Partners, and Discovery Communications. Yesterday, we had a “booth” at the AMA Social Media: Cracking the Code for Business Marketers virtual tradeshow. Both very different approaches to tackling social media – one involved wearing a tie, the other involved carpal tunnel syndrome.

My best gift ever was when, at 8, I finally received my own bike – not a hand-me-down from an older uncle, but a real man’s bike, a black and red space invaders bike with a big banana seat - that I immediately took to the streets in a fit of intense glee.

Customer feedback is a gift, to quote the Chairman of our Steering Committee, which when turned into action should approximate that 8 year old’s satisfaction of finally getting a bike I could ride with pride. At our recent users conference, one of our sessions focused on the challenges and best practices in mining social media for actionable customer intelligence. For more information on what needs to go into a social media analytics solution, register to take a look at our new Guide.

For the purposes of that presentation, we analyzed 128,000 comments about 6 major retailers over the 2009 holiday season. Our Social Media Analysis...

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.