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.
I went into our General Session this morning to hear our keynote Bruce Temkin, Vice President at Forrester and walked into a room with over 160 people from 60 different companies who have all travelled to Disney’s Yacht & Beach Club Resorts for our user conference. That’s about 100% more than our conference last year!
This forum, the agenda of which was designed by our customer steering committee, allows for open discussion and the exchange of techniques for using text mining to analyze customer feedback. Today’s sessions were packed. Some of my favorite moments were:
· Bruce Temkin from Forrester described the path to exceptional customer experience as a "yellow brick road" requiring full application of ones Heart, Brains, and Courage.
· Shane Axtell, Clarabridges head linguist, pulled back the covers on Clarabridges dictionary enhancement process and the advanced sentiment tuning process.
· Sid Banerjee, CEO of Clarabridge, moderated a panel including Clarabridge partners Accenture, Verint, Techrigy, and Kapow.
· Clarabridge customers Expedia, Intuit, and Gaylord Hotels participated in a lively panel moderated by Forrester's Bruce Temkin. The panel covered best (and worst!) practices for successful CEM deployments.
· Goofy himself crashed the end of the last presenation and led the group to a great reception in the C3 Zone sponsored by Clarabridge's partners.
I’m heading over to the Disney Boardwalk to our Clarabridge Party, which literally is going to be magical. Last year’s party ended around 2am—our customers are quite the party people. Tomorrow during my Clarabridge Futures presentation, I’ll be announcing some exciting new features that will be released soon in our 4.1 version. If tomorrow ends up as exciting as today, it’ll have been a great journey.