We’ve added a few links on the right hand side of the blog and wanted to point them out to our readers. They are in alphabetical order and here’s a short description of each one:
Customer Experience Matrix – Written by David Raab, a consultant specializing in marketing technology and analysis, this blog presents information about technologies and business issues that help your organization make the most of every customer interaction.
Customer Experience Matters – Written by Bruce Temkin, Vice President & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, this blog focuses on customer experience and is Bruce’s personal blog and not associated with his employer, although it does reference much of his research.
Customers Rock! – Written by Becky Carroll, long-time customer advocate and someone who is passionate about social media, marketing, and the customer experience, this blog focuses on customers, their experiences, and how businesses can make sure their customer experiences rock!
CustomerThink – Written by several contributing authors, CustomerThink is a global online community of business leaders striving to create profitable customer-centric enterprises. Their main areas of coverage are Customer Relationship Management, Customer Experience Management and Social Business.
These are just a few of the many blogs that focus on the customer experience. Would you like to be included in our blogroll? Do you know of another terrific blog that we should be aware of? Please let us know in the comments.
And in case you missed it, you should view the replay of our webinar with Bruce Temkin: Finding Your Competitive Advantage Using Customer Experience Analytics.
Last week at Amdocs’ Partner Sales Organization annual partner event in Las Vegas, ClickFox was recognized as ‘Emerging Partner of the Year’. As a strategic partner of Amdocs for over a year, ClickFox offers the only true cross-channel software solution on the market, enabling unparalleled visibility into customer experience for improved operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and customer retention. Says Marco Pacelli, ClickFox CEO:
“ClickFox is honored to be recognized by Amdocs as an emerging partner. We look forward to expanding our reach into the marketplace as one of the only combined solutions that delivers insight into today’s complete, end-to-end customer experience.”
Have you had a chance to check out our new Customer Experience ROI Calculator yet? It’s a truly unique ROI tool and many people have tried it out so far with a lot of eye-opening results. I’ve decided to put together a few posts with examples of using the calculator, based on fictitious examples of large, medium and small companies. Today we’ll tackle the large company example. First, I’d like you to take a quick look at the introduction video (click here if reading through RSS or email):
We’re going to look at a company that currently has 10 million customers and is growing at an annual rate of 5%. By leaving all the defaults in place we see that this company has 300 million customer interactions per year. These interactions are through the phone channel (IVR and Agent), Web and Retail. With a 5% increase in self service rates and industry average costs of $5 for a live agent call, $.50 for self service IVR, $.05 for a web session and $20 for a retail visit – we come to almost $1B in cost savings over 5 years. But let’s break this down a little and see what happens in a few scenarios.
Scenario 1: Let’s assume that the company in question is in the healthcare industry and has a much higher live agent cost per call, say $20. We’ll also reduce the number of retail visits to zero and the number of web sessions to 5. We’re going to keep our average number of calls per customer to 8 per year and see what happens. Now the 5 year savings have increased to almost $2.2B over 5 years. But the annual growth target should be lower so we will change it to 2% and we’ll lower the current self service rate to 40%. Even with those changes we’re still looking at a little over $2B in cost savings over 5 years.
Scenario 2: Now we’re going to look at a financial institution that has a robust website and a highly effective self service IVR system. Customers call for various reasons, from ordering new checks or checking an account balance (that can both be easily accomplished in self service) to disputing a charge, which may require speaking to a live agent. I’ve increased the number of calls to 12 per year and number of web sessions to 24. I’ve also increased the self service rate to 75% but reduced the average annual improvement in self service and the annual growth rate of the company to 2%. Even with these reduced improvement levels this company would be able to realize over $1.1B in costs over 5 years.
Scenario 3: This time we’ll look at what happens to a cellular provider who only allows customers to get to an agent after an extremely elaborate IVR. Customers still get through at a very high rate of 70% and they call in 20 times per year. Since these are fairly short calls, each of the company’s live agents is able to handle 35 calls per day. We know that many of these calls can be self-served so we’ll leave the annual self-service improvement level at 5%. At these rates this company will have a slow start and will only realize a little over $400K in costs savings during the first year. But over the course of 5 years that will grow to over $1.4B in total savings.
Do you want to find out how your company can realize these kinds of savings with ClickFox’s Customer Experience Analytics solution? Check out our free Customer Experience ROI Calculator and customize it to your needs. You might also want to read our CEA White Paper to get a better understanding of how it all works.
Anna Convery, ClickFox CMO, will speak at the Technology Association of Georgia’s ‘State of CRM’ event, an annual gathering of technology leaders focused the customer relationship management (CRM) industry. More than 60 senior CRM executives will be attending the State of CRM Breakfast, which will take place Thursday, January 14, 2010, from 7:30 am to 9:00 am at Oracle Corporation, 1100 Abernathy Rd., Suite 1120, Atlanta, GA 30328). For more information, visit: www.tagonline.org.
Every January the TAG CRM Society hosts a panel to discuss the newest trends in the industry. This year, the theme is centered around Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies in 2010, five of which are relevant to the CRM industry: (1) Cloud Computing, (2) Advanced Analytics (3) IT for Green, (4) Social Computing and (5) Mobile Applications.
