Today’s financial services providers are driven to discover new and innovative ways to reduce costs while simultaneously improving customer experience to remain competitive. Join ClickFox, the pioneering leader in customer experience analytics to learn how the nation’s leading financial services providers realized hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings by analyzing the paths of their customers.
A new press release today details how a top-tier telecommunications organization, a current ClickFox customer, has decided to expand their CEA deployment to now include all customer interactions. Based on a proven track record of multi-million dollar results with ClickFox CEA, this leading wireless provider will leverage both existing and new interaction analysis to further improve operational efficiency, customer retention, revenue generation and customer satisfaction.
From the release:
“The telecommunications industry is challenged with steep competition, high customer churn and highly publicized customer satisfaction issues. These issues need to be constantly monitored and analyzed, and limited analysis doesn’t deliver the insights that drive major, bottom-line changes,” said Marco Pacelli, chief executive officer of ClickFox. “ClickFox CEA provides unprecedented levels of insight to all our telecommunications customers by unlocking high-value, time-sensitive information from previously inaccessible sources, including structured and unstructured data.”
Consumers and enterprises are expected to increase interactions with their financial service providers in response to the current economic climate as they strive to re-evaluate finances and shift around assets. Each of these interactions represents the potential to keep or lose important customers, according to Forrester Research, which two years ago defined customer experience as “one of the key skills for survival in the financial services industry.” That prediction seems even more relevant today as financial institutions strive to retain customers in a climate with few, if any, growth opportunities in the short term.
ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) enables some of the world’s leading banking and financial institutions to understand and drive the ideal customer experience by leveraging the significant amount they’ve already invested in automated systems and data collection. By translating complex customer interactions across multiple, self- and assisted service channels – touchtone or speech-enabled Voice self-service, Email, Web, Chat, Agent Desktop/CRM, Kiosks – ClickFox turns data into fact-based insights for optimizing cross-channel business performance and improving overall customer experience.
I just read a fantastic post by Peter Merholz: “A Framework for Building Customer Experiences.” Before continuing to read what I think you should head over to his blog and read it. Are you back? Great! What did you think? Well, I can’t agree more with how Peter defines the inside-out approach to design that many companies take. And like he says, it’s not their fault because they just don’t have the right tools to understand the customer experiences that can then lead to an outside-in design process. But while the framework Peter talks about looks like this:
I think there is even deeper silo fragmentation and the diagram should look more like this:
We still find that many companies design and analyze their customer experiences inside-out in separate silos. They don’t have a way to understand true cross-channel customer experience and behavior paths and patterns. What we at ClickFox try to do is help move our customers from the silos they have been living with and transform them into a consolidated cross-channel view. Then through analyzing the customer experiences first, they can start to create an enterprise outside-in framework like the one below:
What do you think? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.
When faced with the sometimes daunting task of interacting with a company, most people won’t say the word “fun” is the first one that comes to mind. I’ve heard “frustrating” or “time-consuming” many times, but does it really always have to be this way?
I came across the video below (some of you may have seen this already) and thought it wonderfully demonstrates the idea that customer behavior and experience can be changed by adding a little fun into the equation:
Now obviously this is a simple example, but it speaks volumes about changing the experience for the better with a few simple steps (pun intended). If I take this video and apply it to what we do for our customers at ClickFox, I would say that we examine the paths that customers take in their interactions and try to find the ideal paths that would lead to higher customer satisfaction. We can’t necessarily make every interaction more “fun”, but we can certainly try to make it more enjoyable.
We do this by taking a classic champion-challenger approach. First we find the dominant paths that customers take through a system and see which paths lead to poor results (these may be low CSAT scores, customer retention problems, unnecessary live agent transfers, product returns, etc). By analyzing every step of the interaction across any number of interaction touch-points, we can find the problematic steps and look for better ways to handle them. We then propose a new path and test to see whether or not customers going down this new path have better results.
Here’s a quick example from a global services company that wanted to test out their payment process and see if there is a different way to collect Customer IDs in order to get a better success rate. ClickFox identified that at the pivotal moment in the payment process (when the customers are asked to chose the method to input their Customer ID) there was a lot of confusion regarding the correct format to use. By analyzing the complete path rather than the process as a whole, ClickFox was able to see that at this step in the process customers were choosing the wrong ID method, retrying multiple times, asking for help or leaving the flow without completing their payment. We also noticed that customers who were able to complete the payment process without issue had noticeably higher customer satisfaction scores than those who got stuck. So not only was this problem impacting revenue cycles and customer experience, it was also making customers unhappy.
ClickFox made several recommendations that were tested by the company on a fraction of the interactions and showed immediate improvements in success rate when choosing Customer ID methods for payment. In the graph above you can see how the new challenger process outperforms the old champion path that the company had in place for several years. The improvement was quite substantial, coming in at 4-6% improvement on a daily basis. Immediately after implementing the new process across all customer interactions, the company was able to realize tremendous ROI.
What are you doing to add some fun to your customers’ experience? Let us know in the comments.
Today’s financial services providers are driven to discover new and innovative ways to reduce costs while simultaneously improving customer experience to remain competitive. Join ClickFox, the pioneering leader in customer experience analytics, at 1:00 pm on Thursday, October 29th to learn how the nation’s leading financial services providers realized hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings by analyzing the paths of their customers to:
Increase online and self-service transaction efficiency to deflect more calls away from agents
Streamline authentication process for quicker account holder verification and fewer transfers
Improve task flow processes to increase CSAT scores across channels
Attendees will learn how to leverage their existing investments in data warehousing, CRM and BI tools to gain a complete view of the customer experience, enabling targeted improvement strategies that have an immediate impact on operating costs and customer satisfaction and loyalty. Some of the nation’s most respected banking, credit card and investment organizations turn to ClickFox to transform the paths of their customers into multi-million dollar insights – register now to see how we can help you on the path to full, cross-channel customer experience excellence in 2010.
I read an interesting post on the Good Experience blog that got me thinking about how organizations are aligning themselves to become more customer-centric. The post was a paraphrased chat with someone who asked “Since CIOs spend their days deciding which system to buy, or migrate, or install, do they really need to worry about the customer experience?” At first I was surprised that this question even came up. Of course a CIO has to worry about the customer experience, I thought to myself. Doesn’t everyone in the executive suite have to worry about the customer experience? Doesn’t everyone in the company need to worry about it? How can a company operate in a competitive environment without being completely customer focused?
But the truth is that not every CEO, CIO, COO, CFO, etc. worries about the customer experience. And as the post mentions, it’s usually the giants, the old-timers, the ones who don’t understand change that still don’t care about the customer experience. But they are wrong and are ignoring the customer experience at their own peril. Because a young-gun will come along who gets it and eventually topple the old-timer and take away market share until there is none left.
Companies didn’t use to care about the customer or his experience. In fact up until about a decade or two ago those two concepts weren’t even connected to each other. A company sold products to customers, who were expected to pay and go away. The call center was an orphan in the organization and was intended to keep customers away from the rest of the company so it could continue to create and sell products. Eventually, with competition leveling out the playing field and with information at everyone’s fingertips, selling products to unhappy customers was no longer going to work. That costly call center evolved into an extremely important contact center (to allow every form of customer interaction the customers wanted to use) and became the epicenter of the company’s connection to its customers.
Understanding the customer experience and making sure your customers are satisfied is what keeps companies alive and lets them thrive. Take the banking industry, for example. Is there really that big of a difference between the basic services that they offer? Is there that big of a difference in the fees you would pay at one bank versus another? What makes a customer stay with a bank instead of emptying his or her account and walking across the street to a competitor? The answer, of course, is what kind of experience these customers get when they deal with their bank. And that’s why it is crucial for everyone in the organization, from the CEO down to the last employee in that bank, to make it a top priority to think about the customer experience at all times. Because if they don’t, that customer will be gone. And if one customer goes, then they all can go, because there is nothing stopping them from withdrawing their hard earned money and depositing it with the competition.
For more on how Customer Experience Analytics can help financial institutions become more customer-centric, read our financial industry case study.
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.
ClickFox, the leader in cross-channel customer experience analytics, shows 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.
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 the relationship between low CSAT scores and customer churn behavior
Discover how to predict and proactively respond to potential churn with highly effective customer-centric retention efforts
Implement targeted improvement strategies based on comprehensive customer insight across all channels
Contact Professional has published an article written by ClickFox titled “Five Ways Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) Solutions Can Help You Overcome the Shortcomings of Your Business Intelligence (BI) Tools.”
The five ways discussed in the article are:
CEA solutions point you to the problem areas for further investigation.
CEA solutions track customer behavior paths and show you what happened and why.
CEA solutions can ingest data from any system and any format.
CEA solutions bring the customer experience to the forefront of the enterprise.
CEA solutions can complement traditional BI tools.
