Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Sid Banerjee, CEO of Clarabridge (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk about the data sources? You said CRM is one of the sources. What about social media data?

Sid Banerjee: Social media is a very big part of our picture. The majority of our customers are using social media. One thing that is different at Clarabridge from traditional social media and analytics vendors – there are hundreds of people doing this – is that we do a far deeper level of analytics. We apply much deeper statistical, derivative and causality correlation analytics.

It is not all that we do. Our product is intrinsically designed for data of many different sources to be easily integrated into a common platform view for our customers. Clarabridge customers are using social, email, survey, and CRM data, all coming into Clarabridge. The telecom customer I was talking about earlier has about 40 sources coming in from 20 different countries and is pulling together all their data for country-specific views, customer-specific views and an enterprise view. It is not just about “what are people saying about me on Facebook or Twitter?” It is a lot bigger than just that. The other interesting thing specific about big data is that people often think that social media is big data – and it can be in certain industries, where there is a lot of social traffic for a brand or product. But you would be surprised, there is often as big if not bigger data in customer interaction data – data flowing into call centers or into proprietary social channels that are typically run by the company. The typical social media vendor doesn’t attack any of that data, because they can only openly available content. We go after big retailers. Walmart, for example, is a big customer of ours. You know that Walmart is a very big company with many customers. It is easy to imagine that a company like that is going to have many interactions across many different channels, not even including social. When we look at retailers or banks, every interaction is directly relevant, whereas in social media a very small part of that data is relevant to a particular customer. You will find that Clarabridge solutions tend to be much bigger than just the social media application platforms for that same customer in terms of the data that is coming through Clarabridge platforms.

SM: What are some of the interesting trends that you can share? Give us your view into what is happening in social media, CRM systems, private chats of the enterprises’ offerings.

SB: There are a few things people often like to correlate. They often like to correlate things like “what are the specific experiences a company offers to the customer and that tend to relate to that customer indicating an attempt to be loyal or to recommend a product?” A lot of companies will use a technique called Net Promoter Scoring, where they will ask customers at a transaction survey about their views or if they would recommend or endorse this product to a friend or family. The correlation is taking the answer – yes or no – and then look at the unstructured question of “Why did you give this score?” and you will get a fascinating correlation of the things that tend to drive people to or away from a product or service. We also do correlations to financial outcomes – those experiences that tend to correlate with customers who have a high market basket or to those that ultimately have a high propensity to return.

A lot of companies will first look at things like mentions of loyalty. We also look for sentiment expressions. We see something that is spiking up in volume or spiking down in sentiment, we want an analytic on the underlying text that tends to have a high correlation to that increase in volume or decrease in sentiment.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Big Data: Interview with Sid Banerjee, CEO of Clarabridge
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