Gaylord Entertainment Deploys Clarabridge SaaS Solution to Improve CEM

Clarabridge, a provider of customer experience management (CEM) solutions, today announced that Gaylord Entertainment Company (NYSE: GET), one of the world's hospitality and event planning companies, has deployed Clarabridge's Content Mining ServiceTM. With Clarabridge's text analytics capability delivered via the Internet on a hosted, software-as-a-service (SaaS) basis, Gaylord is gathering customer insights from an increasing variety of "listening posts" across the business, enabling the company to better serve hotel guests and support meeting planners.

"From our initial look at Clarabridge, we immediately understood the impact this solution could have across our resorts," said Tony Bodoh, manager of operations analysis for Gaylord Entertainment Company. "We have a whiteboard full of ideas of how to use text analytics, and any one of them could make or save the company significant dollars. The real-time, easy-to-comprehend customer intelligence dashboards that Clarabridge provides enable us to improve operations in a variety of ways and position us for ongoing, long-term growth."

Gaylord is using Clarabridge's text analytics solution to gather and analyze customer feedback from surveys, email, chat messaging, staffed call centers, and online forums associated with guests' and meeting planners' experience at the company's purpose-built convention resorts: Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center in Nashville, Tenn.; Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center, near Orlando, Fla.; and Gaylord Texan Resort & Convention Center, near Dallas, Texas. A fourth resort - the Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center on the Potomac - is scheduled to open in spring 2008.

The Clarabridge solution immediately processes 100 percent of its unstructured, text-based information, reducing employee work time and increasing the accuracy and thoroughness of analysis. Previously, customer comments in Gaylord's surveys were processed manually once a month, and it took three to four weeks to deliver results to company decision makers. With Clarabridge's solution, the process takes minutes and provides Gaylord greater flexibility in manipulating results, ultimately producing a more dependable and useful measurement of customer sentiment and quantifying the "voice of the customer." For example, location managers and corporate executives have used findings to influence decisions on building improvements. Gaylord also intends to use Clarabridge's solution to mine online consumer-review forums, to tailor training per individual employee, to better evaluate and compensate personnel, and to better leverage the opinions and insights of its front-line staff.

"CEM is becoming an increasingly sophisticated and important business practice, and text analytics is the key enabling technology in an effective approach to CEM," said Sid Banerjee, chief executive officer of Clarabridge. "Our text analytics solution allows Gaylord to more clearly understand its unique customer base, enhance its properties and its service in ways that customers most care about, helps avoid costs for projects that customers aren't especially interested in, and helps attract and retain better professionals."

Clarabridge provides real-time customer intelligence on products, services, competitors, and consumer trends that allows companies to respond immediately to competitive situations, develop products, and improve product quality. Clarabridge gives customer-experience managers the necessary software tools to gain unprecedented insight into customer needs, wants, and desires by extracting themes, emerging issues, sentiment, and root cause of customer feedback from text sources such as emails, call center notes, survey verbatims, Internet forums, and social networking sites.