Analyst Perspectives

Clarabridge is an established vendor of text analytics products, which it sells both directly to the market and indirectly through an extensive set of partnerships with companies such as MicroStrategy, IBM Cognos and Verint. Recently it has been marketing its applications under the category of customer experience management (CEM). To me, CEM is about personalizing and influencing the customer experience while an interaction is in progress. Organizations cannot do this without the right information about the customer, and text analytics is one of the primary tools that allows organizations to derive that information; in this way Clarabridge fits in CEM.

Text analytics enables users to extract text data from multiple sources, classify it, analyze it and produce reports and analysis that yield insight into what their customers are writing about them. Clarabridge Enterprise can extract data from any kind of electronic text: forms, surveys, email chat messages, online feedback, text data in business applications or a customer database, and social media. Using natural language processing techniques, the product can extract insights and deliver these in multiple formats to meet individual user requirements. Reports can use prebuilt templates provided by Clarabridge, or users can build their own. The Professional version of the product supports nontechnical users with templates and drag-and-drop capabilities to build their own reports and analysis.

The Clarabridge product supports a closed-loop process that allows companies to extract data, understand its content, including hot topics and trend analysis, analyze customer sentiment and the root causes behind customer comments, predict potential future customer behavior, and raise alerts and establish workflow items that ensure users take action on them. It is challenging for companies to do this in real time (while an interaction is in progress) and deliver the information and/or recommended action back to the person handing the interaction, thus influencing the experience as it is occurring.

Clarabridge’s value proposition is to analyze text data from many sources, integrate it with structured forms of customer data (billing, CRM etc.) and deliver insights to anyone in the organization who is interested in customer-related information. Its software helps individuals make information-based decisions to improve the customer experience and business outcomes. The products are available in the cloud, which, along with the customization tools, makes them easily accessible and easy to use for regular business users and expert analysts.

Text-based data is an increasingly rich source of customer insights, and Clarabridge is a vendor to watch in this area. In 2011 I covered their expansion into Europe and its product advancements which is part of their expanding footprint in the industry. I understand the company will be adding more capabilities in a release planned for next month; I will report on the new capabilities when they are available. So please come and collaborate with me. 

Regards

Richard Snow – VP & Research Director