[REVIEW] White Paper: Customer Experience Investments, ROI, and Business Results by Clarabridge

Introduction / Disclaimer: Gated Resource is a term I am claiming to describe the white papers, eBooks, and webinars used by content marketers for B2B lead capture. Gated Resources are pervasive and subject to a wide range of best practice opinions. My intent is to surface individual Gated Resources through reviews and create conversation about optimization and outcomes. These are my own thoughts without approval or input of my employer or the content authors.

Getting Started

Clarabridge is a SaaS company based in the Washington, DC metro that offers a customer experience management platform.

Clarabridge has an extensive library of gated resources that appear to have well defined target personas. I had to sift through a few white papers to find one less than 20 pages targeting a business user, and this one fit the bill. Most of Clarabridge's content is deep, so this paper may be exceptional in the library.

You can sign up to download today's white paper here.

White Paper Summary

The purpose of the paper is to provide Customer Experience (CX) professionals with methods to demonstrate how investment in a Customer Experience Management platform will contribute to achieving one of 3 primary business goals (page 4) to improve profit:

1. Increased sales
2. Increased customer retention or reduced customer churn
3. Decreased costs 

The introduction is dedicated to providing historical context about the emergence of customer experience as a critical business focus. The approach makes sense and reads easily, but the target persona - the CX professional - is not defined until page 4, so a wayward reader may waste time as a result.

Net Promoter Score

The paper regularly refers to the concept of Net Promoter Score (NPS) as part of its argument, and I had to look it up separately. Is it a safe assumption that CX Pros will know about NPS? I'd be tempted to add a definition of NPS just to be safe because it's a core concept.

The paper does a superb job using Clarabridge case studies to demonstrate the power of a CX Management platform and the potential business impact.

More about Audience

In case you were guessing, I'm a West Coast USA writer, and this paper stands out as British. There's ample use of the word "whilst" and some spellings are consistent with British conventions. Further, money references are in British Pounds, not US Dollars.

I bring it up because it exposes the opportunity to localize a document for better uptake by regionally segmented audiences. It also exposes just how much fun it would be to hang out in London. Anyhow, most of the content I consume sounds like it comes from the USA, and this is fine because I am in the USA. However, if I'm from the UK, is there a benefit by tuning the language to UK writing patterns and spellings?

Sounds like an A/B test scenario to me.

Design considerations

There are zero images, icons, non-Clarabridge logos, or charts. Interestingly, there is an About the Author page near the end, which could have easily supported a photo, but apparently in the interest of keeping it very clean, no image is supplied. The author's personal blog is here and you can check out his picture there. The corporate About Us page at the every end has a couple images, but these hardly count.

It could be a matter of design taste, and perhaps this paper is written to a British audience that doesn't like images, icons, logos, or charts - but therein lies opportunity. This paper could easily benefit from the touch of a competent graphic designer with creative flare and refreshed and promoted anew to an audience that likes all those features.

Here's a meaningless chart just to break things up right now:

The Call to Action

Complaining about Calls to Action appears to be a common gripe of mine, and Clarabridge does not get a free pass here either: there is no call to action in this paper.

Building Momentum?

The closing page is titled "Building Momentum" and offers this advice which sounds hard:

CX teams can collect their own data through activities like omni-channel listening, where they collect and listen to customer feedback data across multiple feedback sources.

The section essentially introduces a chicken or egg scenario. It offers ideas how the CX professional should assemble data to justify a CX platform and even suggests build their own "CX ROI model." Seriously? The data needed to ROI justify the CX platform comes out of the CX platform itself! How can the CX pro use the software to justify itself prior to deploying it?

Solution: set a link to a sweet little CX ROI widget right here. Track the clicks from the paper to the ROI widget, and you've just moved the prospect one step closer to sales. If you're really feeling crafty, you'll capture and attach the input data to the prospect, and create an even more relevant follow up.

Here's an ultra simple ROI widget from Calculator.net:

By the end of the paper, there's a great opportunity to come along side the reader and offer help instead of a laundry list of tasks that may be impossible to execute.

Promotion and Distribution

This paper is buried deep on Clarabridge's Resources section, so helping CX pros ROI justify the solution may not be Clarabridge's core marketing strategy.

In my view, this paper is not ready for syndication and heavy promotion to CX Pros from target industries because it doesn't feel finished. 3rd party demand catalysts like INFUSEmedia can certainly generate signups from CX Pros based on the title and description of the paper, but readers need more guidance within the paper (and more graphics) to make it a solid contributor within a nurture process.

The final Corporate About Us page

There is an About Us page added to the end of the paper, and I find it appropriate here. The paper is completed, and sneaking in an About Us page may be useful. And to be fair - there are two images on this page.

I really wanted better guidance, help, and tools after reading through ways to justify the investment of a CX Management Platform. I don't get that with the About Us page, but I learned that Clarabridge is successful and growing, which is probably valuable.

Summing it up

It feels like I've been hard on this paper, but truthfully, the primary objective is achieved. It does lay out several methods for ROI justification of a CX management platform investment and does a great job at this. The hard work is done.

From here, make it pretty, include a clear next step, offer help at data gathering, and roll it out to a promotion engine.

My CTAs

I have three CTAs based on who you are - please pick one:

1. Are you involved in content marketing at Clarabridge? My intent is to be helpful while learning more about your company. I'd like to have a dialog about your promotion and distribution plans for ongoing lead capture. Please message me.
2. Are you involved in content marketing or demand generation another company and would like me to review (publicly or privately) one of your gated resources? Please leave a comment or message me directly.

Thank you for reading my 3rd ever Gated Resource review. I've got more reviews planned, so if you found this one interesting, please follow and I'll keep 'em coming.

About Me

I'm an Account Executive for INFUSEmedia based remotely in the beautiful Pacific Northwest - about halfway between Seattle and Vancouver, BC - raising a family and dreaming of many adventures ahead. I've been in sales and internet media for about 20 years and am happiest when involved in both at the same time. After all this time, I suppose I should try styling myself as a guru or expert, but I really do love the 1:1 interaction that comes with being in the sales trenches.