Event Report: Customer Experience Management Alive and Well At Clarabridge Customer Connections #C3Rocks14

Customers Celebrate Success With Customer Experience Management (CXM)

Around 450 customer experience professionals gathered at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach resort at Clarabridge’s Customer Connections Event April 28th to April 30th, 2014.  The event brought together professionals passionate about best practices, trends, and techniques in improving customer experience management.  Key customers at the event include major brands and enterprises in industries such as:

• Aerospace and Defense. General Dynamics
• Consumer Packaged Goods/ Food and Beverage. The Coca Cola Company, The Wendy’s Company
• Financial Services and Insurance. Fidelity, Master Card, Progressive Insurance, RSA Canada, Travelers Insurance, US Bank
• Technology. Acer America, ADP, Cisco Systems, Dell, GE Healthcare, Intuit
• Telecommunications. Verizon, Vodafone
• Travel and Hospitality. Copa Airlines, Expedia, Orbitz Worldwid, United Airlines, Virgin America, West Jet
• Utilities. E.On

New Product Release And Acquisition Hint At Clarabridge’s Future Roadmap

During the keynotes, Sid Banerjee (CEO), Nithi Vivatrat (Chief Products Officer), and Brendan Haggerty (Chief Technology Officer)provided insight into the latest Clarabridge 6.2 release and the rationale for the Market Metrix EFM acquisition.

• Clarabridge 6.2 focuses on core capabilities and mass scalability. New features include improvements in unstructured feedback through category derived attributes, increased accuracy of conversation context, redesigned analytical score cards and dashboards, greater scalability.  The goal is to improve listening capabilities in every conversation and provide meaningful analytics.  Further, a new partnership adds Sysomos a partner and into the Clarabridge Connector Library
  Point of View (POV): Conversations with partners and the team indicate that the 6.2 release sets up Clarabridge for a world of mass personalization at scale and big data business models.  Why? The customer demand for  relevant, right time, contextual information will require CXM vendors to deliver information streams that can match up w/ real-time interactions.  Constellation believes the long term value of Clarabridge is in the ability to stream next best actions based on insights, not just provide a customer experience management software platform.  Constellation believes that companies such as Clarabridge are really big data companies purpose built for CXM not CXM companies with big data capabilities.

• Market Metrix enables a complete CXM solution though Clarabridge reaffirms partnership with EFM vendors. The acquisition of Market Metrix adds a feedback solution to the overall Clarabridge portfolio.  Additional capabilities include a performance benchmarking offering and an employee feedback solution. Key Market Metrix customers include hospitality brands such as Wynn Resorts, Langham Hospitality Group, and Red Roof Inn.
  
  (POV): Market Metrix customers chose the vendor for not only the technology, but also its methodology in analyzing feedback sources.   From feedback to case management to benchmarking, customers could follow a defined process that would then provide contextual analysis.   In addition, Clarabridge gains a larger presence in the hospitality industries and key development talent in the San Francisco Bay Area via Market Metrix’s Larkspur, CA office.  As customers seek feedback from all sources including feedback management, the long term road map will include an integrated EFM solution to the core Clarabridge offering.  Based on conversations with customers and the management team, Constellation expects Clarabridge to continue both a partner led offering for other sources and acquisitions to acquire additional sources.

Figure 1. The Flickr Stream from #C3Rocks14

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Source: R Wang & Insider Associates, LLC. All Rights Reserved.

The Bottom Line: Data Driven Decisions And CXM Are A Key Entry Point For Digital Transformation

As businesses step up their digital transformation efforts, CXM provides a tried and true entry point for turning data into information, information into insight, and insight in to actionable decisions.  Customers seek the ability to analyze conversations through a sophisticated and proven natural language processing (NLP) technology.  Customer centric leaders who start with CXM initiatives can bring data driven marketing and customer experience techniques into their overall digital transformation strategy.  These data driven insights provide the foundation for mass personalization at scale and future big data business models.  In fact, the value of the conversations is not the conversations but the interaction among customers, products, related interactions, and other contextual attributes.  Furthermore, expect these solutions to move beyond service based industries as customer experience management moves mainstream in the next 18 to 24 months.

Your POV.

Ready for digital disruption? Expanding your customer engagement programs? Are you able to tie these programs with your general marketing automation programs? Want to improve your results? Have feedback on Clarabridge or Market Metrix?  Add your comments to the blog or reach me via email: R (at) ConstellationR (dot) com or R (at) SoftwareInsider (dot) org.