Clarabridge CX platform review

A customizable tool that can be used by large or growing companies to take their customer service game to the next level

(Image: © Clarabridge)

TechRadar Verdict

Clarabridge is a good tool for large or growing companies to better understand how and where to improve and extract additional value from their customer experience pipelines.

Pros

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    Focused on customer experience

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    Range of features

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    Custom built dashboard and deployment

Cons

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    Not ideal for beginners

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    Limited customizations options

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Clarabridge is a comprehensive customer experience (CX) and digital engagement platform that has been delivering enterprise-grade speech and text analytics solutions for ten years. It uses AI, machine learning, and smart algorithms to help companies extract insights from large volumes of data. These insights are then used to predict behavior and recommend action based on customer emotions, sentiments, and purchase intentions.

Every customer phone call, chat session, tweet, post, comment, and conversation contains nuggets of value that present companies with an opportunity to do something better or to do something the competition has not yet thought of. Clarabridge uses such data to help its clients deliver innovative customer experiences, and they have helped thousands of global brands convert insights into action.

Plans and pricing

Clarabridge pricing plans are provided by the sales team based on your requirements and the industry you operate in. The company currently services clients in the banking/financial services, consumer goods, healthcare, retail, tech/media, and travel/hospitality industries. The size of the deployment you need, as well as the features you want to use, will determine your cost.

For example, clients working in the healthcare services space may require insights related to customer experiences and costs of care, as well as data on how to lower health risks. Retail clients, on the other hand, will likely want to focus on product quality, order fulfillment, and brand equity and identity tracking. Clarabridge allows its clients to pick and choose the metrics and features they want. It then builds a custom solution tailored to those needs.

Clarabridge also provides bespoke solutions for contact centers. Once again, depending on your needs, you can opt for an analysis of call lengths, agent performance, complaints, compliance, customer experiences, or any combination of the above. Custom dashboards and data feeds are then set up accordingly, and your build-up and roll-out costs will depend on the features you opted for and the level of analysis you require.

(Image credit: Clarabridge)

Features

Clarabridge’s solutions are custom-built for great customer experiences. They are designed to transform complexity into clarity, via the following features.

Listen and Connect to Conversations from Multiple Sources

Whether you have calls, chats, surveys, emails, social engagements, online ratings, or product reviews, Clarabridge can connect to hundreds of different sources to collect all of your customer feedback in one place. With a simple click, you can extract insights from all of these sources, whether solicited or unsolicited, giving you a clearer picture of the entire customer purchase journey.

Evaluate Customer Effort

Using the Clarabridge Effort Score, you can easily understand how much effort your customers expend while researching you or buying your products. This metric is directly derived from keywords taken from customer feedback and is used in tandem with sentiment analysis and other KPIs to guide better data-driven decision making.

Analyze Sentiment

Clarabridge analyzes sentiment not at the word level but at the clause level. This helps it overcome the limitations of other sentiment analysis techniques and helps the system accurately capture variation in sentiment on an 11-point scale. The system is also highly nuanced, helping you to avoid taking action on misinterpretations.

Easy Categorization

You can easily group text data into buckets that are relevant to your industry and the types of issues you are trying to solve. Clarabridge uses hundreds of different industry models and many out-of-the-box templates that allow you to categorize as much of your data as accurately as possible.

Emotion Analysis and Intent Detection

You can gain insights into how customers feel when they engage with your company, products, or services by examining and understanding emotions using Clarabridge’s AI-powered semantic analysis model. This model identifies 21 different kinds of intent that are specifically related to customer experience. You can pinpoint requests for help, customer churn, and even legal disclosures by analyzing data in this way.

Data Transcription

With Clarabridge, you can automatically transcribe recordings and interactive voice response (IVR) surveys into text to make sure that you are correctly capturing your clients’ emotions and sentiments. You can also analyze call center transcripts, notes from your agents, and employee feedback. Clarabridge uses a patented chip-based algorithm to transcribe customer voice data 3,000 times faster than software-based transcription engines, that too with high accuracy.

Connect Services Across Your Company

Clarabridge can seamlessly connect with a wide range of platforms and services to give you a holistic view of your data in one place. From Twitter and Facebook to Salesforce, SurveyMonkey, Brandwatch, Hadoop, Teradata, and even the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission, you can gather insights and data from a wide range of sources and analyze them on your custom Clarabridge dashboard.

(Image credit: Clarabridge)

Interface and in use

As mentioned earlier, Clarabridge operates in a number of different industries, each with its own set of requirements and data sources. The good thing about the dashboards and UIs of this system is that they are tailored for use by individual customers, and you won’t have to worry about having buttons or features that are either not relevant to you or that you do not need.

The UI is easy to navigate and you can select data sources, industries, platforms, and types of analysis with a few simple clicks. Interactive graphs and charts help you visualize your data, and you can toggle between different types of visualizations while breaking down your data by customer, market segment, or type of mention.

Integrations with third-party services are also neatly managed. For example, you can easily connect a business email address, team chat service (such as Slack), or Facebook page. Doing so allows you to use those services from directly within your Clarabridge account without having to log into each service separately.

Support

Clarabridge provides customer support via phone and online comment form. You can also access the company’s technical resources page and search for topics based on category, topic, or industry keyword.

The company regularly publishes insight pieces and datasheets to help managers and decision-makers use the many features the platform offers. Those who need more in-depth assistance with surveys or other Clarabridge packages such as CX Studio or Engage can access dedicated pages on such topics.

The competition

Clarabridge is designed for use by large, established corporations. This fact is reflected in the advanced features it offers, such as IVR survey transcription, which is something a smaller company would not likely require. If you are a freelancer or have a small startup, you might be better off using a package such as Qualtrics, which offers better flexibility and customization than Clarabridge. 

Clarabridge also works somewhat exclusively in the customer experience niche. Qualtrics and another major competitor, Medallia, on the other hand, offer a much wider range of services, including CRM integration, lifecycle management, and ad hoc reporting. 

This makes Clarabridge best suited to businesses that exclusively need CX improvements, while Medallia and Qualtrics can help businesses on a number of fronts, depending on what their goals and challenges are.

(Image credit: Clarabridge)

Final verdict

The solution you should choose depends on your needs and the scope of your operations. Clarabridge is a great service for marketers and companies that have established pipelines and platforms through which they interact with their customers. If you are a big company in need of improved CX, then Clarabridge is a great option.

Large companies that need more than CX improvements should consider Medallia or Qualtrics since these solutions can help in other areas beyond CX, for example, in procurement or brand management.

Conversely, if you are a freelancer or new startup and want to extract insights from whatever data you have, a trimmed-down solution such as Qualtrics is probably best for you.