The retailer will use Clarabridge’s Content Mining Platform to analyse what’s being discussed in call centre conversations, customer emails, surveys, product ratings and reviews, and online forums and blogs, with the data feeding back into customer service initiatives.

Dan McDermott, QVC’s senior vice president of customer services, said: “QVC has been interested in text analytics tools for a long time, but we fast-tracked the effort in view of the substantial rise in the data we were seeing, particularly from social media sources.”

Clarabridge CEO Sid Banerjee added: “Customers are talking to companies and about companies more than ever, and across many industry sectors.” The response for many firms, he says, is to make investments in customer experience management initiatives, backed by customer intelligence technologies.

Banerjee’s company boasts of being a beneficiary of these investments, having added more than 20 new customers in 2009, leading to year-over-year revenue growth of 50% – though actual sales figures have not been made public.

For 2010, Clarabridge is beta-testing a new self-service analytics offering, allowing people to upload and analyse text-based emails, open-end survey verbatims, transcripts, social media content and other textual data sources via an online portal.