Predictions for 2010 [Text Analytics and Customer Experience Management]

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. Namely:

1) Social media analysis (SMA) will finally move from "fad" to "function"

In 2009 we saw dozens of companies enter into the Social Media Analytics Space. Clarabridge spent a good part of last year watching the market, and developing an offering that met our enterprise customers’ requirements and needs. 

As we enter 2010 – we believe the market for social media analytics requires a few critical capabilities:

1) deep linguistic parsing + advanced sentiment scoring + intelligent means to separate the spam from the true insights + a robust analytical and exploration level. 

2) an integrated view of customer experience across social media AND non social media sources (surveys, call center interactions, emails, etc) – to capture insights when customers are researching, trying, buying, and getting support with products and services. 

3) combined alerting, problem routing, trending/tracking, and advanced analysis to meet the needs of all stakeholders in a company. 

Many of the investments made in our core product offering easily extend to support social media analytics, and we’ve combined our capabilities with rich social media content from our strategic partners, Kapow and Techrigy, producing a useful, scalable, and actionable solution that supports all the capabilities outlined above.

2) Enterprise adoption of Text Analytics will continue

2009 saw our customers integrate multiple data sources as they deployed to multiple user communities across their organizations. As this trend continues the application infrastructure must support enterprise security, authentication, and shielding of personally identifiable information (as needed) to ensure it meets corporate data standards. 

3) SaaS will grow, but so will licensed software deployments

In 2009 many companies, facing smaller capital budgets, deferred on decisions to purchase software licenses, opting instead for the smaller upfront investments of “software as a service” (SaaS). The trend towards growth in SaaS is unmistakable, but early indications seem to point to resurgence in deployment of licensed software. Companies like Clarabridge that offer text analytics both ways should benefit from their flexibility. 

4) Text analytics will become part of a vibrant and growing partner ecosystem.

In 2010, with systems integrators, platform providers, CRM and Call Center operations seeing a surge in demand for text analytics of customer data, text analytics vendors will need to develop productive partnerships with data warehousing, CRM, call center application vendors, systems integrators, and business process outsourcing firms.

We believe Clarabridge has a unique opportunity to take advantage of these trends and have a strong 2010 just as we’ve had a strong 2009. Our rich SMA solution, robust enterprise architecture, licensing and deployment flexibility, and proven partnering model should bode well for 2010. Most importantly, our customer successes, feedback and support for Clarabridge will help us to continue to adapt, evolve, and create solutions of transformational business value.