Clarabridge Announces Clarabridge Smart Response™ for Real-time Automated Customer Response Management

RESTON, VA. (March 16, 2009) - Clarabridge, the leading provider of text mining software used by many Global 1000 companies to improve customer experience management (CEM), announces Clarabridge Smart Response™, the industry’s first real-time, automated customer issue analysis, response, and routing solution powered by text mining.

Clarabridge Smart Response™ is a fully integrated solution that allows a continuous stream of customer feedback and issues to be automatically analyzed, coded, routed, and adjudicated. The system also generates automatic customer-specific response letters that acknowledge the customers’ negative sentiments or frustrations, specific problems and suggestions, and if appropriate, attaches vouchers, coupons, or other forms of compensation. Clarabridge Smart Response™ is based on and fully leverages the Clarabridge Content Mining Platform’s (CMP) existing natural language processing, categorization, sentiment, analysis, and reporting engines.

In addition, Clarabridge, already an Oracle partner, announces the full end-to-end integration of Clarabridge Smart Response™ with Oracle’s Siebel CRM. The fully integrated solution, to be launched in the fall of 2009, will allow Siebel users to feed incoming customer issues to Clarabridge Smart Response™ and automatically respond to those issues in real-time.

During the past two years, Global 1000 companies have expanded their use of Clarabridge across the enterprise with Clarabridge achieving 300 percent growth in 2008. Product and marketing departments have used Clarabridge for years to improve customer satisfaction, secure brand loyalty, segment customers, and identify product issues and suggestions. As the Clarabridge customer base expanded their use of Clarabridge into the operations and customer support functions, their needs expanded to include driving ongoing operational improvements to decrease costs and simultaneously improve customer service.

“Giving customer support operations the ability to automatically acknowledge and respond to customers’ specific frustrations, issues and suggestions really helps them more quickly close the loop with their customers,” said Justin Langseth, Clarabridge president & chief technology officer. “This new capability will allow Clarabridge customers to fully automate most of the manual work currently done by customer support staff, freeing that staff to resolve the most challenging cases and focus on identifying recurring problem issues.”

Clarabridge developed Clarabridge Smart Response™ in response to these needs and it includes the following capabilities:

• Ability to feed data continuously to Clarabridge from any voice of the customer touch point, including enterprise CRM systems, survey open ended responses, call center notes, direct customer emails, web forms, Web 2.0 sources, and other customer channels.
• Ability to analyze feedback data in real or near-real time using enhanced versions of Clarabridge’s natural language processing, sentiment extraction, and other text transformation modules.
• Ability to maintain coding and categorization structures through the existing Clarabridge Navigator™ interface, so current Clarabridge customers can directly leverage their existing coding models for use with Clarabridge Smart Response™.
• Ability to determine and automatically send the appropriate compensation and response for the specific customer, such as providing a coupon with an apology letter.
• Ability to route a specific case or other operational details to an appropriate customer service agent, operating unit, or CRM system when additional information or analysis is needed or an automated customer response is not warranted.
• Ability to utilize Clarabridge Smart Response™ in conjunction with a customer’s existing Clarabridge Content Mining Platform™ deployment to allow for complete enterprise-wide customer experience intelligence.

“A retailer using Clarabridge Smart Response, for example, can automatically manage customer complaints and suggestions sent via a web form, email, or paper mail and then analyze these through text mining to determine the issue and sentiment expressed by the customer. This same retailer can also verify the customer transaction as well as gather critical customer value information through data received from the point of sale and CRM systems,” said Langseth. “Clarabridge then sends the appropriate response, possibly attaching a coupon for a future purchase. In cases where additional review is needed, the customer case and the preliminary resolution recommendation is forwarded to a live agent via the retailer’s CRM system to complete the resolution process.”

Today, Clarabridge has over 50,000 business users processing more than 50 million customer verbatims annually, enabling them to stay competitive by improving products and services, reducing churn and improving their customer’s overall experience. Clarabridge’s clients include AOL, Best Buy, Capital One, Choice Hotels, Cisco Systems, Inc., Gap, Inc., Gaylord Entertainment, H&R Block, Intuit, Inc., Lowe’s Companies, Marriott International, Oracle, Sage Software, Wal-Mart, and Walgreens, among others.

About Clarabridge
Clarabridge is the leading provider of text mining software for customer experience management. The Clarabridge Content Mining Platform™ provides Global 1000 enterprises an analytical view of text-based verbatims found in consumer feedback channels such as call center notes, qualitative survey feedback, Web 2.0 content, online forums, reviews and customer warranty forms. As a result, businesses can improve marketing, product/service management and customer service delivery. Clarabridge is privately held with headquarters in Reston, Virginia. For more information, visit www.clarabridge.com.