I agree that the VOC customer space is more interesting because the messaging and actual implementation is more interesting vis-a-vis the pure warranty space – for a mix of business and technical reasons:

– warranty feedback comes from fewer customers, and can often be sufficiently gleaned from reading, structured data analysis, and interviewing those who actually service a product in the company.
– warranty support is a back-end function in most companies – meaning it occurs after the hard work and money has been spent to get a prospect to buy and use a product.
– finally – warranty data is generally used by a smaller audience in a company than VOC data – specifically the support, and product dev teams, limiting its enterprise value.

VOC data, by comparison:
- is useful to any customer facing or customer-oriented function in a company, from store ops (helps them figure out how to service their customers better), to merchandisers (helps them figure out what products to stock and promote) to marketers (helps them assess the value and effectiveness of marketing campaigns) to market analysts, to sales executives, to corporate executives who care about the reputations and loyalties of their customers.

Thus – a well designed VOC solution returns, per $$$ spent on the solution, far more value to far more constituencies in an enterprise. In short – VOC provides a greater ROI to an enterprise than warranty analysis.

VOC is also a better fit for text analytics due to the nature of the text being analyzed:
– there’s more text-based customer feedback (surveys, blogs, internal sources likes support sites, support centers, etc), and it cannot be read and acted upon with any degree of accuracy or efficiency without the enabling text analytics technology
– there’s more of a need for quick response. A product warranty issue, unless it’s causing a company’s customers to get hurt, generally can be addressed in weeks to months. A bad service or selling issue can cause customers to churn and never return, and the decisions require near immediate response. Text mining to find, address, and fix broken customer experiences before they cause broken customer relationships is key.

Lastly – customer experience/VOC solutions are important for all times economically – good and bad – because in good times companies want to grow customer bases and good experiences are paramount to keeping good customers. In bad economic times (such as the times we’re in now) companies want to keep their customers, particularly their best customers, and VOC analysis helps retailers, banks, airlines, healthcare providers, and others understand, and more quickly act on feedback.

We’re finding at Clarabridge that our solutions (and I expect those of others in the marketplace) help companies actually lower their market research spend and increase value – because they are able to rely a bit less on manpower intensive collection, reading, collating, and report-producing work done by people and depend more on high performance technology to do the organizing work. As a result a company’s employees can spend their time more strategically analyzing and acting on the insights.

As to futures – I share your sentiments that there is interest from the bigger companies in this solution space, but I’m not worried about our positioning for the next phase of this market. As long as we keep up the R&D efforts in our products to ensure that the technology remains market-leading, and we keep adding customers, adding value for those customers, and we keep developing synergistic partnerships with technology, market research, and solution providers (which Clarabridge is doing aggressively) – we’ll be well positioned for whatever comes next.

Take care,

Sid.
CEO, Clarabridge