Clarabridge Blog

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.

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.

Today Clarabridge announced the capability for our current and future partners to embed text and sentiment analytics in a variety of tools and solutions across a host of industries.

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.

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.

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?...

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...