Communities are brimming with conversations that touch every team in your company: Who’s using your product, and are they having trouble with it or praising a feature? Who’s sharing best practices both for making the most of your product and how to navigate the industry you serve? When done right, community transcends just the Community team. In a Community-Led future, every team benefits as companies work cross-functionally equipped with rich insights from these conversations.

But surfacing the signals from a vast community of quickly shifting conversations is not easy. Historically, community data has been focused on the numbers — who’s engaging, and how often they’re engaging — but has lacked a human context. Whether it’s measuring general sentiment, tracking a rise in complaints about bugs, determining who’s broken the rules, finding a highly qualified lead, or getting user-generated content, it’s hard to track each post and spot trends when there are tens of thousands of conversations happening within your community.

This is why I’m excited to announce that we’ve acquired Caravel, a conversational intelligence platform that surfaces actionable learnings from conversations so you can get context beyond the numbers.

With this acquisition, we’re thrilled to support not only your Community teams but also Support, Success, and Product. The qualitative insight from Caravel combined with the community touchpoints from Commsor will provide a holistic picture to understand what people are doing, what's important to them, and how you can better build your company around their needs.

Caravel’s conversational intelligence is powered by very large language models trained on massive amounts of text from the web and real-world B2B conversations that enable it to quickly understand human communication with minimal training. Caravel packages these models with a simple user interface, unlocking access to a suite of state-of-the-art NLP functions for teams that don’t have the resources to build their own NLP stack — including sentiment analysis, topic classification, and emotion classification.

Bringing Caravel into the Commsor suite of products and services brings us one step closer to the Community-Led future, where Support, Success, Product, and Community teams work together to serve your customer community and help you make the right business decisions.

Caravel and Commsor users will be able to use the services just as they always have — now super-powered with added benefits!

Customers of Caravel will be able to use Caravel as a standalone product, with extended features and community data sources that boost its reporting, analytics, and feedback collection capabilities.

Customers of Commsor will be able to leverage the Caravel technology embedded into CommsorOS, bringing the benefits of conversational insights to Community teams to better understand not just who’s engaging, but what they’re engaging about.

This acquisition means you will be able to:

• Instantly report on the topics of discussion in your community, the topic sentiment, and the people involved
• Stay alert of product feedback, defects, and support needs from your community
• Measure how overall community sentiment is trending and if any implemented changes had an impact
• Pair sentiment and activity data to understand the impact of members, their health, and if they’re likely to take an active role
• Conduct surveys across your community
• Create segments of members using conversational insights along with activity and member data for more personalized engagement

And this is just the beginning. We’re excited to hear from our community and learn how this partnership can benefit you!

Caravel is run by a fantastic team who have built an exceptional product in a short time, and I’m thrilled to welcome them to Commsor as our newest team members.

“From the get go, it was really clear that we shared a similar vision of how companies of the future will be built,” says Maxwell Folley, Founder and CEO of Caravel. “For us, it was centering our technology around customer-centric companies, the ones bringing humanity back into the way we do business, which is a core part of the vision of being Community-Led. 

“Beyond this alignment of vision, Mac and I quickly gained conviction of the match of our technologies and data. As the rest of the Caravel team and I met the broader Commsor team, it became clear that there was an alignment of vision, solution, and culture.”

With Caravel’s focus on conversational intelligence, the product has excelled at providing its customers with qualitative insights. Maxwell is excited to help Caravel and Commsor’s customers combine these insights with numerical data. “Where our eyes have been set for the future is how we tie qualitative information with quantitative touchpoints. It’s incredibly powerful to pair those data sources together and build solutions around that.”

I hope you’ll join us in giving Caravel a warm welcome to the Commsor community!