Sometimes some things just work together, and work together well. Clarabridge is finding that point out for itself as it embarks on a new strategic partnership with Brandwatch in a bid to bring more social analytics capabilities to its line of Customer Experience Management (CEM) tools.
Clarabridge was already widely regarded as a major provider in the CEM market, thanks to its Clarabridge Social line of tools that allowed users to get in on some of the customer information floating around in social networks. But trying to get usable customer data out of a social network can be difficult; while products and services are certainly being discussed, the information is so diffuse and widely scattered across thousands of profiles—not to mention what happens to the information within the profile itself—that getting useful information out of that profile can be difficult to say the least.
This is the situation that Brandwatch comes into, and its own line of tools in the social analytics and monitoring solutions fields provide a way to better take advantage of the information that can be had. Since Brandwatch's specialty is social media data, Clarabridge can incorporate the systems designed to yield all that social media data Brandwatch can gather into its own operations, thus allowing organizations to better search for social media data.
Brandwatch can derive useful data out of a variety of social networks, as it's designed to work with such staples as Twitter and Facebook, but also with regional favorites like Weibo and RenRen. Brandwatch can even pull data from unexpected—yet highly data-packed—sites like Web-based forums, news sites and even blogs. That's a lot of commentary going on, and a good place to start trouble brewing before it turns into an all-out firestorm. Clarabridge, meanwhile, can better allow users to make sense of all that data, trimming through social posts and spam messages and the like to focus on the posts that have actual, worthwhile, and actionable content.
The partnership is a natural fit; while it's well known that people are voluntarily putting up a lot of information on the Internet—the kind of information that can pay incredible dividends for a company—the problem is that only so much of that information is actually useful. If someone were to take a firehose's worth of water pressure and fire that same pressure through a needle-size aperture, the end result is an incredibly piercing stream of water. This is what the Clarabridge/Brandwatch partnership looks to do; to take that enormous quantity of information and funnel it into a very narrow aperture, providing only the most useful, most valuable, and most piercing information.
It's the kind of partnership that's likely to pay dividends down the road, and those who use the Clarabridge/Brandwatch system should find a wealth of new, actionable insights as a result.