Clarabridge Blog

Forrester Research expects social media marketing to grow to 5 billion dollars by 2016. (Statista) While Social media platforms are voicing more and more of your customers, it is only natural to use these channels to market and advertise to your target audience. But how can you be sure you are utilizing these channels to your advantage, to improve the perception of your brand and cultivate loyal customers?

What will CRM look like in 5 years? Some thought leaders, such as Ray Wang in Software Advice’s blog post CRM’s Next 5 in 5, have put forth the suggestion that context services will provide a more detailed view of customers. I agree with the prediction, and suggest that in the next five years, we will see businesses more fully merge customer engagement with market research techniques by leveraging solutions that integrate survey and social data, such as text / sentiment analytics, with customer relationship management platforms. Businesses will be able to collect customer feedback from multiple listening posts and customer touch points, such as call centers, social media platforms and emails, integrating the data with key customer attributes to add a different dimension to an in-depth customer profile. Businesses will be able to segment their customer base and understand the voice of their customer at a granular level, allowing them to engage operationally with their customers on an individual basis.

For Clarabridge, 2011 was another banner year. We saw customer growth by well over 50%, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revenue growth by over 100%, the expansion of our product to support 7 languages, the opening of our European headquarters, 98% customer retention, and the development of an increasingly dynamic and robust partner ecosystem that uses Clarabridge to power valuable customer experience insights, analytics, and actions.

At C3, Clarabridge will officially launch the next major release of Navigator (5.0). 5.0 provides organizations with the fastest time to value for their Voice of the Customer (VoC) and Customer Experience Management (CEM) initiatives. Plus, we will be releasing a critical new module – Clarabridge Collaborate. Collaborate gets information to the people who need to know, fosters collaboration & discussion across departments, and creates an environment for resolution and accountability.

Over the past couple of years text and sentiment analytics have been applied to traditional and social feedback (surveys, review sites, social media) to track issues, trends, correlations of experiences to survey or experience outcomes - using a mix of statistical and quantitative analysis techniques.

Companies are getting progressively better at listening to – and acting upon – the voice of the customer. Much of the credit goes to advances in text analytics and the widespread adoption of related platforms. Still, there’s a lot of room for improvement as companies look to further evolve their capabilities in this area.

Humans are emotional beings. We make decisions based on our emotions all the time. For example, I love Entenmann’s doughnuts. My decision of which dessert to buy is almost always hijacked by my memories (most of them recent memories) of that cakey doughnut deliciousness every time I pass by the Entenmann’s stand at the grocery store. The chocolatey flavor, the texture of the cake-style doughnut, the sweetness sometimes covered in milk dominate my thoughts as I almost instinctively reach out for that next box. Sound like an addict? Well, not that extreme, but quite illustrative of very many decisions that all of us make on a daily basis. And in the age of the Internet, more and more customers are expressing their opinions to a worldwide audience. In enters sentiment analysis, which provides the tools needed to mine customers’ opinions for more insightful feedback.

United Airlines has come a long way in the way it listens to its customers. From the time of paper surveys and manual coding to automated text analytics of online surveys, Matt Hadfield has seen United move to a whole new level of customer experience management.

Best Buy has always known that its employees know a lot about their customers, and that gathering that knowledge can be valuable. Before text analytics however, it was “very difficult to do what we knew was important other than a survey every once and a while,“ said Best Buy’s Steve Wallin.

 

When trying to understand your customers, it is important to use a combination of rich unstructured data anchored by quantitative structured data, agreed the members of the Executive Panel at the Clarabridge Customer Connections Conference Wednesday morning.