The customer experience challenge met: Clarabridge

Summary: The series continues with Sid Banerjee, CEO of Clarabridge I've known Sid for awhile now and think the guy is a straight shooter. Clarabridge is a good company generally - a very good one - but that's not the question at hand. Do you think he put his money where his mouth is? That's what he says he's going to do. You tell him yes or no in the comments.

PG Note: I've known Sid Banerjee, CEO of Clarabridge for about 3 years and always find him to be both a knowledgeable guy about his company, smart on the industry and fun to hang out with too.  Clarabridge is one of the companies local to me so once in awhile we hook up for lunch and chat.  Sid thinks according to what I have here, that he proves that Clarabridge is a customer experience focused company. The real issue is whether or not you think it is.  But if anyone can articulate that position, its Sid. So....

Your floor, Sid.

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First, I’d like to thank Paul for this unique opportunity. There are many companies out there that claim to do customer experience, but very few are able to put their money where their mouth is and actually prove it. Today, I am going to do just that.

Let me start from the beginning. Since our start in 2006, Clarabridge has been focused on customer experience, specifically understanding the Voice of the Customer (VoC). We continue to do this every single day in the way we recruit, hire, and train our team, design our product enhancements and roadmap, and with the services we offer the market. We started as a company focused on text and sentiment analytics with a patented NLP engine as a way to analyze, understand, and categorize customer feedback. Since then, we have invested extensively in our product offerings and our team, and we have evolved into a company that focuses on powering end-to-end customer engagement – or what we call “Intelligent Customer Experience.”

While it’s not enough to just say we’re doing this, I will expand in the next few paragraphs,to prove to you that we are aggressive in our investment in and innovation of Intelligent Customer Experience.

First, let me go into a little more detail about what we mean by Intelligent Customer Experience.While it used to be enough for a business to simply listen to customer feedback data and then act on it internally, this is no longer the case. If a business wants to thrive, it has to take its customer experience initiative to the next level. “Intelligent Customer Experience” means working as a CEM partner to enable a business to launch an enterprise CEM solution to do everything from collecting content from multiple sources, leveraging powerful analytics, and intelligently using customer-feedback findings to improve the overall business (I am talking about everything from customer loyalty stats, to marketing functions, to the bottom line). It’s about providing the right feedback to stakeholders across the organization to collaborate on findings and resolutions and, finally, creating lasting relationships with customers by engaging with them on their feedback.

Formally, we describe ourselves as the leading provider of CEM powered through intelligent text and sentiment analytics. Our solution offers a holistic approach to customer experience and customers leverage our products to:

Perform Multi-Source Listening: Our customers intelligently listen to all internal and external data in any format (things like emails, surveys, chats, online feedback, contact center info, social media, review forums, VoE, etc.). Our product portfolio also includes easy-to-use connectors so that organizations can connect directly to leading data providers such as Salesforce.com, Bazaarvoice, Radian6 and others. This means that regardless of where the customer is speaking out from, Clarabridge enables organizations to holistically listen and understand what is being said. Clarabridge has always recognized the importance of holistic listening as a critical function in sophisticated customer experience.Create a Single “Voice of Truth:” We have a long history in analytics and that is demonstrated through our sophisticated reporting that leverages statistical analysis and linguistics to reach a very granular level of understanding. We continually make significant investments in the depth of analysis our customers can glean through their data with enhancements such as root-cause analysis, comparative analysis, automated theme detection, and real-time alerts.Infuse CEM into the DNA of the Organization: We work with our customers to operationalize insights across the enterprise to drive smart business decisions. To us, Intelligent Customer Experience can only be truly successful when it touches all aspects of the organization. With our Collaborate module, organizations can bring key customer feedback insights to relevant stakeholders across the enterprise (customer support, operations, product management, marketing, QA, legal, etc.). This empowers cross-departmental collaboration to solve complex challenges. The Clarabridge Engage module filters through feedback to pinpoint actionable customer feedback, allowing for intelligent real-time customer engagement and response. By promoting proactive interactions with customers, organizations can to resolve issues faster, bolster engagement, and create more meaningful relationships. Create Enterprise Customer Experience (ECE) Organizations: Did you know that Clarabridge has more customer implementations than any other CEM provider? We know better than anyone what will and won’t work when creating a customer-experience-centric organization. We partner with clients – not only to provide technology – but to enable the creation, strategy, and growth of an ECE company. We help transform organizations into ones where customer experience is a core part of the corporate culture. While the strategies behind creating ECE organizations differ based on the customer, some examples include bringing best practices to the table, defining stakeholder requirements/priorities, building and documenting processes, spearheading CEM program execution, providing ROI assessments, and selling CEM up the organization. Show Measurable Impact: Clarabridge’s reporting capabilities measure key factors like sentiment and volume changes alongside more traditional data like satisfaction and likelihood-to-recommend scores through side-by-side comparisons and extensive reporting options. This allows the organization to prove and track the value of its customer experience strategy.      

This year and beyond, we are looking to further our mission to bring Intelligent Customer Experience to the enterprise. We’re hearing a tremendous call for this in the market (across all verticals) and most companies are prioritizing customer experience initiatives – something that is reflected in the fact that Clarabridge grew by more than 60 percent in 2012 over 2011. 

While I could go on and on about Intelligent Customer Experience, this is a blog response and not a white paper.  We are also posting our customer experience case on our blog and I invite you to engage with me on this topic in the Comments section. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Topic: Enterprise Software

In addition to being the author of the best-selling "CRM at the Speed of Light: Social CRM Strategies, Tools, and Techniques for Engaging Your Customers," Paul Greenberg is President of The 56 Group, LLC.

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