ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

Erika Morphy of CRMBuyer.com wrote an article about self-service in general and specifically named IVR systems as one of the problematic channels that customers don’t like to use:

One area of technology development that has not progressed at a head-spinning pace is self-service — that is, automated systems that aim to help customers without involving an actual human rep. Although these systems have improved over the past couple of decades, some nagging problems are still commonplace — like, why do I have to repeat my account information over and over again?

Donna Fluss of DMG Consulting is also quoted in the article:

At the moment, applications or tools that help organizations identify what is not working with their systems are making the biggest impact on the market. “These are optimization applications from IVR vendors and standalone providers,” she told the E-Commerce Times. The category is loosely defined as “customer experience analytics,” or CEA –”an emerging application area which looks at the customer self-service experience.”

As the leader in Customer Experience Analytics, ClickFox sees many companies that struggle with understanding customer paths and behavioral patterns in IVR systems. But even though the IVR is the gatekeeper to the more expensive agent interaction, it is only part of the overall cross-channel strategy that a company needs to consider. Once these customers who were asked to repeat something in the IVR zero out, what happens to them? Do they end up with the right agent or they get transferred to another agent? What happens on their next interaction with the company? What happened before this bad experience ever took place? What do the CSAT surveys show? How does all this affect churn rates and what is the likelihood that another customer will go through the exact same path but have a completely different experience?

While IVR systems may be the source for a lot of customer frustration, they are just one piece of the puzzle. ClickFox CEA can analyze all the systems in the enterprise, whether self-service or not, and visually show the paths customers follow to good or bad experiences. By analyzing beyond the IVR, companies can see the effect that one interaction channel has on all the others and their customers’ reactions and preferences.

To learn more about ClickFox CEA, read our Technical White Paper or watch our 8 minute Product Demo.

For more from DMG Consulting, read their ClickFox Company Report.

“The ClickFox Experience,” our quarterly newsletter was sent out earlier today and contains information about the following items:

• Latest ClickFox News
• ClickFox’s Webinar Series
• Did You Know?
• Upcoming Events
• ClickFox at SpeechTEK 2009
• Free Downloads

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Last week TMCnet.com published an article discussing the ways that Customer Experience Analytics can help companies overcome the shortcomings of BI tools. Here is a short excerpt from the article:

Certain surveys have found that only 13 percent of companies implementing BI tools will ever achieve their original business objectives. Market research has shown that of surveyed executives in Fortune 500 companies:

76 percent were forced to make decisions because not all the information was available in time
63 percent believe that BI reports are simply reference documents used to justify a decision after it was made
70 percent do not receive reports that provide predictions about problems or potential opportunities.

In today’s complex customer interaction environment, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to navigate through the data jungle in order to find what you’re really looking for. While companies have invested heavily in building multiple customer interaction touch-points, they have neglected to understand that their customers will ultimately decide how they want to interact with them in the first place. Instead of focusing on cross-channel customer behavior patterns, customer tendencies and the ability to understand customer intent, they have been focusing on analyzing customer interactions in silos and using BI tools to generate limited insight.

Although the shortcomings of BI tools can be easily overcome by using new CEA solutions, this does not mean that the time and money invested in BI has gone to waste. On the contrary, a well-designed BI solution with a powerful schema can be used as one of the data feeds into a new CEA system. By combining the capabilities of both systems, working in unison, results will be achieved much faster and with greater ease.

To read more about the ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics solution, download the white paper or view the ClickFox CEA5 Product Demo.

On October 1st, at 1pm EST, we will host a webinar titled “Dramatically Reduce Customer Churn and Build Loyalty with Customer Experience Analytics:”

Increased competition within today’s marketplace and customer demand for diverse communication methods means that companies must address customer experience across all available service channels to stay profitable. However, traditional approaches only provide a one-dimensional view into customer behavior patterns, offering little to no insight into retention opportunities.

Join us to hear how one of the nation’s largest service providers was able to save over 1,500 customers per month by analyzing specific behavior patterns leading to dissatisfaction and churn. ClickFox CEA delivers a powerful view of customer experience across all touch points, enabling companies to proactively respond with highly effective, customer-centric retention strategies.

Attendees will learn how several world-class organizations across industries are using ClickFox CEA to:

• Gain insight into which specific customer experiences lead to negative and positive CSAT scores
• Understand and quantify the relationship between low CSAT scores and likelihood of customer churn
• Implement targeted process and retention strategies based on comprehensive customer insight across all channels

Limited seats are available – reserve your seat today.

We are happy to announce our new partnership with Greenplum this morning. Greenplum Software is the pioneer of Enterprise Data Cloud™ solutions for large-scale data warehousing and analytics, providing customers with next-generation capabilities including elastic expansion and sandboxing, multi-petabyte scale on commodity hardware, and massively parallel analytic processing.

“One of ClickFox’s top priorities is keeping the technology relevant so it exceeds customer needs,” said William Hawley,chief operating officer (COO) of ClickFox. “Our integration to Greenplum reinforces that goal to provide highly optimized speed in processing customer behavior and cross-channel analytics. ClickFox currently processes over half a billion multi-channel customer interactions per month for some of the nation’s largest businesses and service providers across industries, and this figure is expected to double in 2010.  By giving our customers and partners access to the benefits of the ClickFox-Greenplum integration, we offer them the best of customer experience analytics combined with massively scalable, proven grid computing. Ultimately this translates into faster speed-to-intelligence and improved business operations.”

Read the entire press release here.

This week, ClickFox hosted the latest in our webinar series with an event that focused on Customer Experience Analytics in Retail. If you missed this webinar, which also included an excellent CEA product demo, you should click here and register to to view the replay.

To register for any of our upcoming events, please click here.

Other useful links:

1. CEA Product Demo
2. Retail Industry Brief