ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

In the beginning there was complete chaos. Companies were focused on their products and their bottom line and the customer was just a mere afterthought. But eventually competition caught up with everyone and nobody was safe. Customers had more options and they wanted to be treated well or they would just walk away. The idea that an organization actually had a relationship with its customers was quite revolutionary at the time and companies realized that they needed some way to manage those relationships.

And so, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications surfaced and an entire industry was created to help companies wrap their arms around these new technologies and methodologies. CRM was and still is a complex solution and has become fragmented across the organization. There are several flavors of CRM (Operational, Sales Force Automation, Analytical, Campaign Management and recently, talks of Social CRM) and many vendors battling for market share in an economy that is tough on spending. And spending on complex, long implementations is not something that people enjoy.

About a decade ago a new term, Customer Experience Management (CEM) was coined in the marketplace. Where CRM focused on how the company tracks the information it has on its customers, CEM put the focus on the customers themselves. The customer was no longer a byproduct but rather the main focus of the company. The experiences were a new source of information for the company in a competitive environment. They could be mined and dissected in order to give the company actionable insights from interactions.

CEM became an industry standard and a hot topic. But CEM was, and still is, focused around customer-to-agent interactions and in today’s market that’s just not enough. Customers have more ways to interact with a company than ever before. Customers expect to have the best experience every time they reach out and interact with a company. Every time and in any way. And the industry is starting to evolve and look at other interaction methods. So lately, CEM has slowly morphed into Contact Center Performance Management (CCPM).

But there’s a bigger issue. These customer interactions are usually analyzed in a silo or even worse, in a vacuum. However, interactions don’t occur in a vacuum, they are actually part of a timeline. Something happens before, between and after these interactions. Only when you put together all these events can you start to understand the true customers’ experience, from their point of view.

So that’s where Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) comes in. CEA is the next step in the evolution of understanding the customer experience. Seeing the experience through the eyes of the customers allows a company to match the customers with the way the want to be treated. Customers has a unique behavioral DNA and specific behavior patterns. Would they rather use the website to pay a bill but feel more comfortable talking to a live agent when they need a new card? Would they rather deposit a check at an ATM or with a live teller inside the branch? Is there a specific segment of your customer base that would rather do one over the other?

CEA allows a company to look at every interaction individually at every touch-point and combine them all into a comaplete experience. It exposes customer behavior patterns that are very difficult to understand otherwise. CEA enables a company to engage their customers like never before and provide them with the most delightful experience possible that match their needs.

The silos are gone! Viva la evolution!

Click here to read more about how your company can make the move from contact center to contact centric and how Customer Experience Analytics can complement and leverage your existing CCPM solution.

I came across an interesting article titled “Overheard – The IT department decides what data you get to see?” that raises a lot of very valuable points about the shortcomings of current BI tools. One of the things that jumps at you right away is a quote from Forrester Principal Analyst, Boris Evelson, who is quoted (from a different article):

“One bank CIO recently told me ‘We had the data, but we did not have the information,’” said Evelson, shaking his head.

This is something we hear from our customers on a regular basis. Coupled with the fact that a recent Forrester survey shows that over 40% of enterprise IT decision makers use three to five BI solutions (more than 20% of CIOs surveyed said they run six or more BI tools!) and you start to understand where the confusion comes from. How is it even possible to know what to look for in that jungle of data and tools?

One of the differentiators of the ClickFox CEA solution from standard BI tools is that it doesn’t require you to come up with a question to ask. ClickFox CEA will analyze your data, visualize your customers’ experiences in and across any interaction touch-points you may offer and automatically generate a default report (we call traffic viewer) to show you where everyone is going and what they’re doing. We also automatically generate dominant paths that show you customer preferences and behavior patterns. Armed with this knowledge you can then dive deeper into certain behaviors and analyze specific customer pain points.

Another differentiator is that unlike traditional BI tools that show you a lot of “how much of something  happened”, ClickFox shows you what happened and why. Rather than going through multiple tables of endless data and trying to extract information from them, we lay out customer behavior in a way that lets you easily understand where things went wrong and what you might want to do to fix the problems.

And one last point to touch on, which is a pretty big issue when dealing with multiple data sources – ClickFox CEA can ingest data from any system in any format, so you’re not stuck in the old-world of silo analytics any longer. This way, instead of analyzing data with multiple BI tools for several different business silos, you can combine all the information in ClickFox CEA and see the complete customer experience, from beginning to end. You can also see cross-channel behavior patterns and trend customer behavior over time. So when a customer goes to your retail location, then checks your website, then calls your speech IVR and eventually gets routed through a CTI server to a live agent – you see the entire interaction in one place (if you kept count, that’s 5 interaction touch-points). Ask yourself the following question: Can your existing BI tools easily give you this kind of visibility?

To read more about the ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics process, click this link and download our technical white paper.

And if you have any comments (agree / disagree) or questions, we’d love to hear from you too.

We’ve recently updated the resources in our download library to make the documentation more readable and included some new screenshots in our white papers. If you haven’t checked these free downloadable resources, you should do so right now. Here’s a quick look at the new design – click the images to download these files immediately (Financial Case Study – left, CEA Technical White Paper – right):

A few days ago Gartner issued a press release where they discussed recent analyst feedback stating that BPM (business process management) solutions have helped companies reduce costs by as much as 20% in the first year of use. The article says:

As companies try to find cost optimization opportunities during the economic downturn, business process management (BPM) investments can provide a cost savings of as much as 20 percent within the first year of implementation, according to Gartner, Inc. Analysts have said enterprises can achieve the payback from their BPM implementation within a year.

Gartner defines BPM as “a discipline that optimizes the performance of end-to-end business processes (interdepartmental functions, partners, suppliers and service providers)” and recommends that companies use it wisely. While we agree with this definition, ClickFox sees Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) as a mirror image of BPM from the customer experience perspective. Where BPM is mostly used to streamline internal processes and to confront business challenges and complex business relationships, CEA can help a company visualize and understand the complex interactions it has with its customers.

At a recent Gartner event in London, an estimated 70% of attendees were from companies who are in “survival” mode and only 20% said they were using BPM as a catalyst to grow their business. ClickFox CEA is currently being used to generate a competitive advantage for our customers, especially in the current economy where customer retention and brand loyalty are driven by the overall customer experience.

Additional information:

Click the following link to view a replay of a recent ClickFox webinar featuring Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research titled: “Finding Your Competitive Advantage Using Customer Experience Analytics“:

Click the following link to view a replay of a recent ClickFox webinar featuring Elizabeth Herrell of Forrester Research titled: “ClickFox and Forrester Research define Customer Experience Analytics” where we discussed how to reduce service cost while improving customer experience:

We just sent out our quarterly newsletter and wanted to share it with site visitors and blog readers as well. Feel free to share the link with your colleagues as well.

The ClickFox Experience | Q1 2009

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Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

Avinash Kaushik wrote a terrific post on his blog, Occam’s Razor, titled “Aggregation of Marginal Gains: Recession Busting Analytics!” which touches on topics that apply not only to web analytics but can be expanded into customer experience analytics as well. If you haven’t read Avinash’s post, do that now, then come back and read more here.

OK, welcome back! Let’s get started, shall we?

1. Figure out what interaction channel is costing you the most money.

This is fairly straight forward. Compare channel interaction volumes across all your different customer touch-points and multiply by the cost per session. This will help you focus on the channel that is most important to begin with:

2. Cover all your bases by analyzing every interaction channel.

How does your company interact with customers? Try to think about that one for a minute. Live agents? IVR? Speech applications? Web? Email? Kiosk/ATM? CSAT surveys? All these systems generate a log file that can be analyzed to bring you insight and help you understand the complete customer experience. If you don’t analyze one of these interaction channels, are you missing out on valuable information? You sure do!

Some of our customers have added data from retail locations, CTI servers, meter readings, segmentation data from their data warehouse, churn information and many other sources. The more data we ingest, the better the model we create of the customer experience. And we can take data from any system in any format.

3. Task flows are key!

What some people call funnels, we like to call task flows. Task flows show customer motive and direction. Task flows show customer behavior patterns. Task flows show you what issues your customers have when interacting with you.

Here’s what a task flow looks like for a customer trying to activate a new pre-paid mobile phone (click image to enlarge):

As you follow the customer experiences through the task flow you can see where most of the drop-offs occur and start analyzing the reasons why they happened in the first place. Here’s a simple example of a low-hanging fruit issue that can be easily resolved and create tremendous savings (click image to enlarge):

In the example above, customers trying to activate their new phones are asked to enter their zip code. But look at the departures caused by this simple question. More than 9.5K customers every week drop out when asked for their zip code! If we look at the reasons they’re leaving we find that 60% get a global confirmation dialog as their next step (that’s one of those “did you say…?” questions that make customer hate your IVR). These 60% never come back to complete the task flow meaning that whatever they were asked to confirm was not resolved. An additional 27% either asked to speak with a live agent or tried the help menu. Why are so many people having a problem entering their zip code?

By optimizing your IVR speech applications to recognize zip codes better (or in this case making sure that all valid zip codes are accepted by the system in the first place) and perhaps by making the prompt more direct (“What is your BILLING zip code?”) you might be able to keep customers on the right path and reduce self-service frustration. Is this the kind of experience you want to give your new customers the first time they call to activate a new service? I don’t think so.

You can also evaluate whether or not you actually need to ask your new customers for their zip code. In this specific example we found out that the information was not captured or used in any way. That’s an extremely costly mistake! These customers were well on their way to complete their activation in self-service (approximate cost=$.50) but instead ended up with a live agent (approximate cost=$5). That’s a potential mistake that can cost this company over $2M annually.

Can you afford to make mistakes like these?

4. Figure out what other channels your customers are coming from and why.

When analyzing web sessions it’s easy to know how customers came to your site by analyzing referrals and keywords. So you don’t have to do a lot of digging to understand your website’s bounce rates. But what do you do about other interaction channels? By tying together all these interactions across multiple channels you start to get a clearer picture:

By analyzing these cross-channel experiences and diving deeper into the reasons for channel-to-channel transitions you can gain valuable insight into your customers’ behavior patterns. In the graph above, were these customers ones who went to a retail location to purchase a new product or exchange a defective one? How long did it take customers, after the initial retail transaction, to call the IVR? Once in the IVR, did the customers try to self-serve or did they ask for a live agent immediately? Were the agents able to resolve these customer issues or were there additional repeat calls?

There is so much more you can learn about customer behavior patterns when you see the full picture and analyze a complete cross-channel experience.

5. Make small changes that when aggregated will make a big impact.

Sometimes the smallest changes can truly create a very big impact. One of our customers had an issue where 80% of new callers to their system, when asked to choose a pin code, were being transferred to a live agent (try to imagine your new customer acquisition cost growing by $5). The first problem was that the customer wasn’t even aware of this problem. The second problem was that the amount of time new customers were given to select their pin code was very short (4 seconds). The third problem was that instead of repeating the question the system immediately transferred the customers to a live agent.

All these seem like small issues to resolve (analyze everything, extend time to 6 seconds, add a retry/timeout loop), but when you combine them together you create a more powerful task flow that only sends 20% of new customers to live agents. These small changes will make a big impact on your new customer key performance indicators, will positively affect customer satisfaction, reduce the likelihood for customer churn and improve the overall customer experience.

I hope you found these tips helpful. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

To read more about examples from our customer, please visit the case studies section of our Download Library.

ClickFox, the pioneering leader of Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) software and solutions, today announced that the company has been selected as one of the Top 40 Innovative Technology companies in Georgia by the Technology Association of Georgia (TAG), the state’s leading technology organization.

“Our congratulations to ClickFox for making this year’s Top 40 list,” said Tino Mantella, president of TAG. “Every year the Top 40 competition is one of the highlights of the Georgia Technology Summit, and this year is no exception.”

Click here to read the full press release.

We asked Marco Pacelli, ClickFox CEO, about his top 5 tips for building customer loyalty. Here’s what he had to say along with a few examples:

1. One Experience Does Not Fit All:
The first tenet of customer loyalty is about serving customers according to their preferences. Different customer segments tend to have strong interaction preferences – choosing, for instance, to speak to a live agent or to log on to their account via mobile browser to check account balance. Similarly, by analyzing customers’ past interactions, you can tailor the customer experience, as well as avoid potential points of frustration or annoyance, such as marketing products that they already own. The caveat: To truly know thy customer requires a holistic, cross-channel perspective. For example, one financial services provider found small business customers were much more likely to utilize self-service options whenever possible and only speak with a live agent when absolutely necessary.

2. Treat New Customers With Kid Gloves:
You can only make a first impression once. Start the relationship on a bang by exceeding their expectations, not by asking them to jump through hoops. When was the last time you’ve walked a mile in your customers’ shoes? Case in point: A financial services company found that new customers didn’t have enough time to enter their newly opened account number after being prompted. Increasing the window of time drastically boosted the percentage of successful interactions as well as the likelihood customers would continue to utilize self-service in the future. By looking through the lens of the customer and tracking when and why they interact with your company, you can find opportunities to streamline processes to make it easier for customers to quickly get past the learning curve and kick off the relationship on a high note.

3. Don’t Wait, Anticipate:
Related to the first tip, this means capturing the right customer data to anticipate the needs of individual customers or customer segments. Again, this requires a sophisticated cross-channel understanding of your customers in order to make it quick and easy for them to do business with you. For example, a leading telecom company determined that about a third of customers making a payment via IVR followed that interaction by checking their account balance using their mobile device. Proactively sending their new, updated account balance via SMS Text / Email would have delighted customers while at the same time eliminating an additional contact. Similarly, if you know that certain customers always prefer a certain interaction channel for certain interactions, offer it as a default option.

4. Be Wary of Channel-Specific Metrics:
Good internal metrics don’t necessarily mean that it’s good for customers or the business as a whole. Look at the big picture to truly understand the overall impact of operations, processes, and policies. For one telecom company, customer satisfaction with the automated IVR dropped, resulting in the incorrect assumption that the application had gone “out of tune.” However, after linking the Customer Satisfaction scores with the interactions, the company quickly learned that the drop in customer satisfaction was in fact due to higher service restoration times for customers with outages and had nothing to do with the IVR.

5. Strive For “First Experience Resolution”:
In the contact center, we know that “first contact resolution” is a key metric. But how well are you doing across all of your channels? A customer might try to resolve an issue or complete a transaction by first logging on to their account from their computer or BlackBerry, before later calling into your contact center to speak with a live agent. How do individual customers navigate through your service delivery system? Where are the gaps in your customer experience? A leading telecom company found that customers were searching in vain for product support help online before eventually abandoning their search and picking up the phone to speak with a live agent. By focusing on quick issue resolutions and constantly being on the lookout for opportunities to simplify and streamline customer-facing processes you’ll go a long way to winning over the hearts and minds of your customers.