ClickFox Blog

Our second event in the ClickFox Webinar Series, featuring Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research is now available for playback. Just click the link to register and view the rebroadcast.

Bruce highlighted the importance of customer experience in differentiating your company from the competition. He’s been speaking and writing about Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD) at Forrester and on his blog for a while now (read more at Customer Experience Matters). ClickFox highlighted how Customer Experience Analytics is helping companies gain valuable insight into customer behavior and is leading to significant improvements in customer loyalty and satisfaction.

We will soon announce our next event. To subscribe to our RSS feed and be notified of the next event, click here.

To replay the webinar follow this link.

McKinsey & Company has just published a new article in The McKinsey Quarterly about “Maintinaing the Customer Experience” in which they make some very valid points.

In their report they state that as a result of challenges in the economy, consumer companies are “cutting back the service levels that customers have come to expect,” and as a result, “satisfaction scores are reversing.” McKinsey’s research shows that the focus of senior executives on improving customer service is growing in importance but they advise executives in charge of customer experience to have the “courage” and “instinct to look for ways to self-fund customer experience improvements.” They suggests that companies find ways to “minimize wasteful spending while learning to invest in the drivers of customer satisfaction.” Much of the problem lies in over-investment in expensive technology, specifically without the ability to analyze what the problems really are according to the customer.

In summary, the McKinsey report suggests that in these tough economic times, “by managing the customer experience more rigorously, companies can maintain quality while still saving money,” that “finding these savings requires rigor in customer experience analytics,” and that savings can be reinvested in improvements to problem-resolution processes.

We completely agree.

And that’s exactly what we do!

Our very own Myles Rose, Vice President EMEA at ClickFox, has published an interesting article over at MyCustomer.com titled “Breaking down the barriers to customer experience measurement.” Here’s a short excerpt to get you started:

Today’s companies are using multiple channels and complicated paths to do business. Unfortunately, traditional reporting and analytics tools cannot identify the ideal customer experience across all of these channels, nor can they tell businesses where they are effective and where they need to change.

To read the entire article click here. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this subject, so please leave us comments or questions below.

We hope you’ve been keeping track of all the new material available for download from our Download Library. We’ve just added a new Telco Case Study to the financial and utility ones already published. Here’s a brief summary:

One of the most popular prepaid wireless brands in the US was searching for a way to reduce live agent support by providing more effective voice self-care options. Customer care management was interested in the ability to monitor changes in customer behavior and gain actionable insights and recommendations on next steps to increase self-service completion rates and reduce costly, live agent support. In 2006, the company chose ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) on-demand solution to provide a visual view and baseline understanding of what callers were actually doing when they called into the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system for sales and support issues. Today the wireless brand’s customer interaction data is fed into ClickFox software and then modeled and mapped allowing visibility into customer behavior patterns previously not available to the company in such a visual and systematic manner.

So what are you waiting for? Click here to download it now!

We’ve translated our Financial Case Study to Spanish and have it available for download from our Download Library. Here’s the summary and a download link:

Descubriendo el Valor de los Análisis de Comportamiento del Cliente: La Percepción de una Institución Financiera Global de Alto Impacto

Una de las instituciones financieras más grandes del mundo proporciona una gama completa de productos y servicios bancarios, de inversión, administración de activos y gestión de riesgo a consumidores individuales, pequeñas y medianas empresas y grandes corporativos . Son líderes mundiales en depósitos, gestión de activos y tarjetas de crédito y débito, y atienden a millones de consumidores y negocios, bajo la misión corporativa de ofrecer la máxima conveniencia al cliente. Descargar.

Have you checked out our Download Library recently? Well, we’re constantly adding new resources for you to download. We’ve just added three new white papers:

1) ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics

ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) enables the enterprise to analyze any customer interaction at and across multiple interaction touch-points. ClickFox CEA is platform, channel and technology independent and delivers a true total customer experience view, within and across all self service, contact center, retail and other channels. Download it here.

2) IVR Optimization Best Practice

The IVR is an important gateway to the customer experience with the entire enterprise. ClickFox’s analytics methodologies have been traditionally deployed for IVR systems with much success. By utilizing ClickFox’s unique capabilities, an enterprise can and will improve their IVR strategy and see immediate results. Self service systems and IVRs in particular, have traditionally had very limited visibility into the customer experiences, choices and behaviors. ClickFox unveils the inner working of these systems and allows step-by-step analysis and improvement.  Download it here.

3) Moving from Contact Center to Contact Centric

ClickFox enables the enterprise to fully understand service from the customer’s perspective. The true customer experience is a multidimensional experience threading through and across all touch points an enterprise offers their customers. Retail store, kiosk, ATM, Web, wireless, email, chat and telephone touch points are opportunities for insight and a holistic view of the customer’s experience. Through this multichannel experience, the customer defines their service experience.  Download it here.

I hope you enjoy reading through these white papers and hope you’ll leave a comment if you have any questions or want to further discuss any of these topics.

Finding your competitive advantage using Customer Experience Analytics

There’s no question about it: It’s a tough time to be in business today. As companies tighten their belts and budgets, executives are forced to cut excess and prudently invest only in mission-critical projects with proven, hard ROI. In short, successfully weathering the storm means getting back to basics and that means renewing your focus on what really matters:- delivering an exceptional customer experience; running lean, highly efficient operations; creating market-differentiating products and services.

History has shown that in times of crisis, the winners and losers are separated not by how much they were able to slash costs, but rather by intelligently investing to build their competitive advantage. Instead of only focusing on retaining customers, they also look to attract and win new ones.

Are you using Customer Experience Analytics to help your enterprise adopt Experience-Based Differentiation measures to gain a competitive advantage? How would you describe your approach to customer experience? What are your obstacles to delivering an overall better customer experience? Are you obsessing about customer needs instead of product features? (Hint: You should be).

Join us as we invite Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research to explain how enterprises are heading down the path towards Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD) and embarking on the long journey to eventually embed EBD in their corporate culture. Bruce will dive into lessons learned from Fortune 500 companies who are differentiating themselves from their competition every day.

Speaker:
Featured Guest: Bruce D. Temkin - Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

When:
1pm EST, December 11, 2008

Who Should Attend:
VPs of Customer Service/Customer Experience, CIOs, VP Marketing, all C-Level and Senior level managers responsible for customer service, the customer experience, customer service channel strategy, managing call center and self-service channel operations and costs.

Sign up today!

UPDATE: The recorded event can be viewed by clicking here.

ClickFox has recently started a new webinar series to help define Customer Experience Analytics. We will feature several customer experience gurus from Forrester Research, such as Elizabeth Herrell and Bruce Temkin, as well as other surprise guests.

The first webinar was already completed on November 6th and the topic was
Reducing Service Costs While Improving Customer Experience with Customer Experience Analytics. The guest speaker was Elizabeth Herrell - Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research. The event was very well attended and if you would like to see the recorded rebroadcast, click on this link.

Our next event is scheduled for December 11th at 1pm EST and will feature our guest speaker, Bruce D. Temkin, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research. Bruce describes himself as a customer experience change agent, helping large organizations improve business results by changing how they deal with customers. He writes a terrific blog titled Customer Experience Matters where he posts his thoughts on the subject on a daily basis. It’s a must read for any customer experience professional.

Until we finalize a time for the next webinar you can register through this link.

UPDATE: The next event will be at 1pm EST on December 11th, 2008. You can register by following this link.

Check back here often to get the scoop on all of our upcoming events. Or simply subscribe to our RSS feed.

ClickFox has recently published a couple of case studies that we wanted to make sure you were aware of. These case studies are based on real world data and show how Customer Experience Analytics has enabled corporation to better understand their customers and gain tremendous business advantages. For the financial industry, we published a case study titled Harnessing the Value of Customer Behavior Insights at a Global Financial Services Powerhouse. Here’s the case study overview:

One of the world’s largest financial institutions serves individual consumers, small and middle market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk-management products and services. They are top-tier globally in terms of deposits, assets and debit and credit cards, serving millions of consumers and businesses, guided by a corporate mission to provide unmatched customer convenience.

A very active customer base generates over 1.3 billion calls per year handled by self-and assisted-service channels. A corporate strategic goal was to raise customer satisfaction and delight combined with a key tactical goal to improve self-service automation rates and experience. The organization wanted to understand how their customers actually move through a variety of self and assisted processes. Most pressing was a desire to discover the paths and actual customer experiences within the interactive voice response (IVR) system, given the call volumes and the bank’s abiding principle of offering customer convenience.

To register and view the complete financial industry case study, click here.

---

The second case study is for the utility industry and is titled Cross-Channel Customer Experience Analysis at U.S. Fortune 500 Natural Gas Distributor. Here’s the case study overview:

A Fortune 500 natural gas distributor currently serves over 2 million customers in multiple states, growing its customer base dramatically over the last couple of years. A key challenge facing this utility is to match a commitment to customer service satisfaction while maintaining their reputation as one of the most efficient natural gas distribution companies in the United States.

At the end of 2007, the company chose ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) on-demand solution to analyze voice self-service for customers calling into U.S.-based call centers. Single channel analysis of the voice self-service customer experience began in early 2008 and was followed by a broader, cross-channel analysis combining voice/ Interactive Voice Response (IVR), CRM/Agent Desktop and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) data. The company was looking for a clear picture of customer traversal through self-and assisted service channels overlaid with CSAT feedback to gain understanding of customer paths and how they correlate to customer experience.

To register and view the complete utility industry case study, click here.

---

We will be publishing several new case studies in the following weeks. Next up are case studies for the telecom and healthcare industries. Be sure to check back often.

Welcome to the ClickFox Blog!

ClickFox is the pioneering leader of a new field called Customer Experience Analytics (CEA). So what does that mean exactly? In a nutshell, CEA software synthesizes all information from all customer touch-points in an integrated, visual view to understand and manage the “Total Customer Experience.”

Customers are multi-dimensional beings; their true behavior is manifested in a complex web of interactions. So why settle for only a limited single-channel window of understanding into the customer experience? By pulling together data from all your systems (from IVR & CRM/agent desktops to web and email to handheld devices and kiosks, among others), ClickFox CEA connects the dots with visually intuitive mappings of all your customer interactions to reveal hidden connections and powerful customer insights.

With this holistic view, you can build a significant competitive advantage by enabling better, faster decision-making on fundamental questions, such as: What is the ideal customer experience? Where are we falling short and why? Why do individual customers defect? Where and why do customers get frustrated as they move through our different channels? What really drives 1st contact resolution, effective cross-selling and other key metrics? Where should we best invest our limited time and resources?

So stay tuned right here. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll give you access to white papers, case studies, recorded webinars, sneak peeks into new product releases, how-to video guides and more. We hope you’ll join us in some lively discussion as we open the floor to questions and we get to know each other better.

That’s it for now. Please be sure to bookmark this page or subscribe to our RSS feed via your favorite RSS reader. And don’t be shy: leave us a comment once in a while!

Let’s get started.