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.

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

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

Want Marketing Success? Examine Your Internal Processes Before You Invest in Technology!

By Patricia Seybold

Today’s marketers need to use social media, email, mobile, and web technologies to effectively target and personalize their messages. Ideally, all of these targeted and personalized “campaigns” are managed by an integrated suite of marketing automation tools.

Marketing automation is one of the fastest growing niches in the technology landscape for good reason: it enables marketers to personalize their nurturing of leads and get higher conversion rates. Personalized marketing results in higher conversion rates for self-service sales, better quality leads to sales people for assisted sales, and, of course, higher revenues. It also helps marketers reduce creative production costs, cut short poorly performing campaigns, and improve predictability of revenue.

However, too many marketers view the technology as the panacea, so they often select and start to implement technologies, such as marketing automation systems, before addressing their own organizational issues and business process requirements.

Why Marketers Value Content Curation Services

By Patricia Seybold

As Web site owners, we used to worry about keeping the content on our Web home page fresh. We still do. We also care about ensuring that all of the information on our Web site(s) is up-to-date, accurate, consistent and easy to navigate. Today we also care about having fresh, insightful content anywhere a prospect might stumble upon it.

Now, in addition to maintaining fresh relevant content on our web sites, we also need to tweet, post, and link several times a day.

Social Media Has Upped the Ante
Why does social media matter?

The more people link to, tweet about, and "like" the informative and/or entertaining information we provide, the higher our organic search placement will be. That means that when a hot prospect is actually looking for what we offer, they’re going to find it easily. The more people comment, blog about, or reference information that we've branded or co-branded, the more buzz we can generate. The more buzz, the more mindshare. The more mindshare, the easier it is to convert tire-kickers to buyers.

Empowering Your Subject Matter Experts to Engage with Social Media

By Patricia Seybold and Susan McKittrick

In B2B marketing, experts' content lures prospects and drives online engagement…but the marketers who run these marketing campaigns, by and large, usually aren’t the technical experts in the content areas that interest their company’s customers. It's often hard for marketers to get the real experts in the company to participate in social media conversations; these SMEs are too busy and/or they undervalue the results that can be obtained by commenting publicly and/or contributing their own perspectives to the topics of interest to customers.

That's why we became interested in a social media curation and commenting platform that's designed to help professional subject matter experts become social media curators and commenters. ConnectedN focuses on your experts' needs to:

a) Identify interesting content from trusted sources

b) Highlight or comment on that content on a branded microsite

c) Get legal/marketing approvals for any content or commentary that needs it

c) Redistribute links to highlighted content and/or the expert's comments on third-party content to a variety of social media sites (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.)

d) Control the time(s) of the day/week, etc. that they devote to reviewing and commenting on potentially relevant and useful content

ConnectedN’s Content Curation for Social Media Engagement
Enabling Busy Subject Matter Experts to Deliver Valuable Content to Clients and Prospects
By Susan McKittrick, Analyst and Senior Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, March 24, 2011