Customers.com Technologies

Helping Businesses Deliver Effective Social Service by Leveraging NLP

Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, frequently called text analytics technology, is key to analyzing what customers are saying about your company. So leveraging NLP is a big part of the best social-service products. NLP input is the content of customers’ posts, messages, and feedback, while NLP output is a tree structure that represents and contains their syntax, semantics, context, and intent. NLP processing performs tasks such as:

• Corrects spelling
• Parses content to determine parts of speech and their relationships
• Extracts entities and facts
• Resolves vague pronoun antecedents (anaphora)
• Determines the meaning of unknown words using their morphological attributes
• Identifies phrases
• Identifies relationships between words and phrases

This week’s report is about Clarabridge Analyze, Clarabridge Collaborate, and Clarabridge Engage—the Voice of the Customer/ social-service offering from Clarabridge, Inc., a privately-held software supplier based in Reston, VA. Clarabridge Analyze listens, analyzes, reports, and alerts on customer conversations on social and on internal channels. Analyze’s alerts are sent to Collaborate for their assignment and management. From within Collaborate, facilities of Engage let agents respond to and interact with customers.

How Is Customer Service Technology Changing?

How Did Customer Service Technology Fare in 2012?

With this 4Q2012 Customer Service Update Report, we complete our ninth year of quarterly updates on the suppliers and products in customer service. Yes, we’ve been writing these reports since 2004, focusing on factors that are important in the evaluation, comparison, and selection of customer service products: customers, products, and company activity, staffing, and financial performance.

This quarter the suppliers and products are:

- Aptean Knova
- Attensity Analyze and Attensity Respond
- eGain Service
- IntelliResponse Virtual Agent (VA)
- KANA Enterprise, KANA Experience Analytics
- Moxie Spaces
- Next IT ActiveAgent
- Nuance/VirtuOz Intelligent Virtual Agent
- Oracle RightNow CX Cloud Service
- Salesforce.com Service Cloud, Knowledge, Marketing Cloud (Radian6)

Briefly, customer service came back strong in 4Q2012 to post a very good quarter driven by customer growth. We’re relieved and encouraged. Fourth quarters are typically good quarters for software suppliers, as their customers complete strategic projects and spend down expiring budgets. But, at the end of 2011, we were concerned. There had been a string of six consecutive mixed quarters, and it raised concerns about the state and the future of customer service software. One quarter certainly does not make a trend, but we’re encouraged. The suppliers we track have introduced or will soon introduce strong new products and major new product versions that will help their customers deliver better customer service.

Need Personalized Recommendations? Peerius May Be Your Solution

By Sue Aldrich

If you sell products and/or deliver content online or via mobile phone, there’s usually a big benefit to being able to provide personalized recommendations tailored to each site visitor. Automated personalized recommendations can double or quadruple the click-through rate on your site, increase the number of products each customer buys, and increase the frequency with which they return to buy again. For the content owner—whether a merchant selling products, a publisher presenting articles, or a marketer presenting offers—recommendation technology means delivering the most attractive item in those few seconds before you lose your audience’s attention.

Web site owners worldwide have yearned for recommendations ever since Amazon started telling us that “people who bought this also bought that” and today tell us “52 percent of people who looked at this bought that; 26 percent bought this other thing.” A decade ago marketers had to spend a great deal to implement recommendations on their sites. Today, recommendation engines can be had for some hundreds of dollars a month and can be implemented in a few days. Don’t you just love SaaS?

Do You Handle Customers’ Queries via Social Media?

As consumers or as business people, we use the social web to answer questions and solve problems about products, services, and businesses.

For so many of us, Twitter or Facebook have become the primary sources for answers. Tweet first; research later.

Patty Seybold often reaches out for help on Twitter and Facebook: “Can’t access Verizon Wireless voicemail from Europe, any clues?” or “Time Warner Internet down in Boothbay, anywhere else?” or “What’s the best XXXX product for doing YY?”

I personally prefer forums and communities. They’re focused, not so noisy, and they sometimes have notifications facilities. For instance:

The forums on Apple products—iPhone, iPad, and the various Macs—are great for “crowd-sourcing” answers on “how to” questions about using these products.

The mycarstats.com forum helps me diagnose and resolve problems with my 1999 Volvo before I take it to Frank, my mechanic. I replaced the antenna mast myself with help from the forum.

The experts in the communities on davesgarden.com have answered many of my questions about plants and plant care for my very heavily shaded property in Massachusetts. I’ll be planting Astilbe and Hosta this year.

How Do You Collect and Respond to Social Queries?

The fact that customers and prospects are buzzing about their issues, asking questions, and looking for recommendations and advice via the social web creates a problem and an opportunity for most companies. The problem is obvious: how do you know what customers are asking/saying about your brand/and your products if you’re not monitoring the social web? The opportunity is equally obvious: if you can spot and respond quickly to customers’ social queries, you gain their respect and their admiration. Not surprisingly, there are products your organization can use to help take advantage of this opportunity. We call this category of products “social-service” solutions.

Attensity Analyze and Attensity Respond: Not for the Faint of Heart, but Offering Exceptional Value

Social media is hot. And so are the tools that marketers are using to analyze consumers' social behavior and social conversations. Attensity offers three such tools: Attensity Analyze, Attensity Respond, and Attensity Pipeline. Attensity combines its analysis of the conversations that consumers have with one another and with your employees—in your own customer service applications and forums—with the conversations they have "with the world" using social media tools.

How Does RightNow Social Experience Stack Up?

This week’s report is our evaluation of RightNow Social Experience, the social-service component of RightNow CX, RightNow’s—or, should we say, Oracle | RightNow’s—customer service suite. The report is also our first social-service evaluation in our new series. As usual, we perform and document the evaluation against a framework of evaluation criteria. We’ll use the same framework for all of our social-service research, allowing easy, apples-to-apples comparisons and fast and easy product selections. Briefly, here’s what the framework looks like:

Customer service best fit

• Positioning and target markets 
• Deployment
• Environments
• Packaging
• Pricing
• Customer base
• Alternatives (competition)

Our Latest Quarterly Report on Customer Service Suppliers

By Ronni Marshak

We continue our seventh year of quarterly updates on the suppliers and products in customer service. These updates focus on factors that are important in the evaluation, comparison, and selection of customer service products. The 10 suppliers/product lines that we have been covering are:

• Astute Solutions ePowerCenter and RealDialog

• Attensity Group E-Service, Voice of Customer Suite, Social Media Suite

• Consona Corporation Knova

• eGain Service

• InQuira 8 (now Oracle Knowledge Management)

• IntelliResponse Answer Suite

• KANA 10 Service Experience Management, Overtone

• Moxie Software Customer Spaces Knowledgebase (formerly nGenera CIM nGen KB)

• RightNow CX (just acquired by Oracle)

• Salesforce.com Service Cloud
  

Read the latest on each company’s performance, products, and company activity. Next week, we’ll bring you a timely and detailed product review on RightNow CX Social Experience so you can better understand the customer service portfolio that Oracle is assembling.

Customer Service Supplier and Product Update
3Q2011 Was a Quiet Quarter for Customer Service
By Mitch Kramer, Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, December 8, 2011

Customer Service Suppliers' Update - 2Q2011

We release our latest quarterly update on 10 major suppliers and products in customer service:

• Astute Solutions ePowerCenter and RealDialog
• Attensity Group E-Service, Voice of Customer Suite, Social Media Suite
• Consona Corporation Knowledge Driven Support and Knowledge Management
• eGain Service
• InQuira 8
• IntelliResponse Answer Suite
• KANA 10 Service Experience Management
• Moxie Software Customer Spaces Knowledgebase (formerly nGenera CIM nGen KB)
• RightNow CX
• Salesforce.com Service Cloud

We’ve been providing these quarterly updates for seven years!

Social-service is the hottest trend in customer service. We call it social-service because it's about customers using social networks to get answers to their questions and solutions to their problems by monitoring and searching social media. The term social-service fits naturally with the terms self-service and assisted-service to categorize the channels that customers use to get answers and solutions. In 2Q11, Attensity Group, IntelliResponse, and RightNow introduced products and product versions and/or announced jointly developed solutions or partnerships that included support for social-service.

Combining Content Curation with Customer Communities

By Sue McKittrick

What’s the best way to lure customers to your web site and to your wares and to keep them coming back for more? 1) Provide compelling, seductive, timely, and relevant information to your target audience—not sales pitches, but authoritative information from objective third parties and great tips from their peers. 2) Make sure that targeted information turns up everywhere your target audience is likely to go—not just on your web site, but also on others’ sites, in the social media conversations they follow, and in the news. 3) Supplement your online forums with relevant tidbits of 3rd party information that address your customers’ concerns, pique their interest, and stimulate dialog.

It’s tough to grow a vibrant online customer community. It takes a lot of care and feeding and a lot of fresh information to keep your audience engaged. That’s why many of the “content curation” solutions that have been pouring into the market over the last three years are now addressing online communities as well as enterprise-level content curation.

There are now over 20 different suppliers of content curation tools. By and large, these solutions are designed for marketers and for publishers. They provide content aggregation, filtering, and categorization services that yield pre-categorized excerpts of articles and blog posts that are timely and relevant for your targeted audience(s). These content curation solutions typically offer workflows that speed up the job of finding, organizing, adding valuable commentary to the article excerpts, and getting internal approvals to publish those links and commentaries. They also manage the distribution of the targeted content via email, social media, and/or into your online (public and private) user communities. As these solutions evolve, so does our advice about how to select the right solution for your needs. This week, Sue McKittrick offers the third version of her Content Curation Evaluation Framework. Even if you aren’t “in the market” for content curation tools, this up-to-date description of the state of the art in content curation is worth reading, if only to understand what’s possible!

Content Curation Evaluation Framework, Version 3
What to Consider When Evaluating Content Curation Platforms for Marketing
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, September 8, 2011

How Customer-Centric Is the Evolving Content Curation Ecosystem?

By Patricia Seybold

Why do we need content curation? To help us find and highlight the gems of useful information among the clutter. Content curation aggregates, filters, organizes, and highlights information for a specific audience. There’s a growing ecosystem of professional content curators (a hot career opportunity!), suppliers of technology to automate content curation, and marketers and social media practitioners who are using content curation to attract prospects, to nurture leads, and to keep customers engaged with their brands.

We’ve been covering content curation as a hot new discipline. Sue McKittrick has created a framework for evaluating content curation platforms and services that are used by B2B marketers. She has also reviewed a number of content curation platforms, including ConnectedN, Eqentia, Loud3R, and today, Curata. She looks at how well these solutions make it easy for the marketer, content curator, and subject matter expert to do their jobs. She also reviews these platforms from an information-consumer’s point of view.

But, today, let’s step back and think about this evolving ecosystem. How well does it actually help end-customers get the information they care about?