ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

CRM Magazine today released their choices for The 2010 CRM Service Awards and ClickFox has been recognized with the Rising Star Award. The editors of CRM Magazine explain that the CRM Service Awards are designed to remind us that technology plays a critical role in the customer experience. Even in those rare moments when we do have choice, we’d better also have the benefit of information, lest we squander it. That probably makes information one of the cornerstones of service, as well. Describing the Rising Star Awards, they say:

In their short lives they’ve been able to empower and enable the delivery of high-quality service to their clients’ customers.

What’s more, this year’s winners have accomplished that feat during a period of economic recession, a trying set of circumstances that have hamstrung companies 10 times their size and resulted in lasting repercussions not only with startups but with their current and prospective clients as well.

In the article about ClickFox, Keith Dawson of Frost & Sullivan is quoted:

“I was impressed when ClickFox took apart its application and tuned it to specific applications aimed at specific business processes,” says Keith Dawson, principal analyst for information and communication technologies at Frost & Sullivan. “When you do that in a space that has had trouble getting traction—like analytics—it’s a sign that there’s a realization you need to actually produce the goods and not just talk about them.”

To read the complete article click here.

Join us for our next webinar featuring Forrester analyst, Bruce Temkin, titled “Understand your Customers as Individuals, Not Individual Transactions”.

Register NOW!

Understand your Customers as Individuals, Not Individual Transactions – Featuring Bruce Temkin

Thursday, March 18^th 1:00 pm EST

Forrester analyst Bruce Temkin estimates that customer experience quality could cause swings of $242 million for a large bank and $184 million for a large retailer, but also notes that one of the biggest challenges to success is a lack of cooperation across the organization. Chances are, you already know how customers interact  in stores, on web sites or with call centers, but looking at these interactions independently of each other creates huge ‘blind spots’ resulting in increased operations costs and customer churn. Connecting the dots between service channels delivers a complete picture of customer experience, not just several individual snapshots, for true customer-centric improvement strategies.

Join Bruce Temkin and ClickFox CMO Anna Convery to learn how best-in-class companies are applying a cross-channel approach to customer experience to:

• visualize customer experience across all retail, web, voice self service, and live agent interactions
• apply the appropriate mix of highly efficient, lower cost customer service options
• build a behavioral model for deep analysis into customer paths, trends, and preferences
• understand the direct impact of experiences on CSAT, churn and future buying behavior
• predict and proactively respond to potential churn with highly effective retention strategies

Attendees will hear several powerful case studies illustrating how cross-channel customer experience analytics is delivering multi-million dollar insights and enabling organizations to finally understand their customers as individuals rather than a series of individual transactions.

Register NOW!

You can also watch a replay of our previous webinar with Bruce Temkin, Finding Your Competitive Advantage with Customer Experience Analytics, here.

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.

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.

We had a great time at SpeechTEK this year! While some of the exhibitors were milling about, we had a lot of traffic at our booth and people were 3-4 deep trying to get a glimpse of the live demos we were running around the clock.

There was definitely a buzz about ClickFox’s ability to deliver cross-channel customer experience analytics and it seemed like everyone wanted to know more. Here’s a quick video of what the booth looked like. You can see Jeff James, Senior Director of Sales Engineering, engage the crowd in a discussion about the capabilities of CEA5:

ClickFox CMO, Anna Convery, sat on the panel “Using Analytics to Drive Value” with several other industry experts. While many companies have been quick to jump on the “analytics” bandwagon, many of the solutions offered today are technology specific and do not offer an easy way to combine multiple silos of information intelligently. Convery was there to try to help clear the air and set the right expectation for organizations looking to understand the complete customer experience, across all enterprise interaction touch-points.

We met many familiar faces as well as several new ones. We wanted to thank everyone who came by the booth, or met with us in person at other venues. We’d like to give a quick “shout out” to some of these people (in no particular order):

• Sheri Greenhous – Managing Partner, CRMXchange (on twitter @sgreenhaus)
• Adele Sage – Analyst, Forrester Research (on twitter @adelesage)
• Aphrodite Brinsmead – Associate Analyst, Datamonitor (on twitter @diteb)
• Judith Markovitz – President, J. Markovitz Consultants
• Ginger Conlon – Editor-in-Chief, 1to1 media (on twitter @gingerconlon)
• Nancy Jamison – Jamison Consulting (on twitter @NancyJami)
• Keith Dawson – Principal Analyst, Frost & Sullivan
• Erin Harrison – Senior Editor, TMCnet
• Bill Meisel – President, TMA Associates
• Daniel Hong – Customer Interaction Technologies Analyst, Datamonitor (on twitter @D_Hong)

We’re sorry if we left anyone out of the list, we literally met hundreds of people at the show this year. Looking forward to 2010!

BTW, the demo that Jeff is showing in the video above is now available for viewing on our website after registration. So if you’re interested in seeing what all the excitement is about, click here.

ClickFox and Business Systems UK announced today that they are teaming up to bring Customer Experience Analytics solutions to the EMEA market.

“We’re delighted to be aligned with a market leader such as Business Systems,” said Marco Pacelli, CEO of ClickFox. “Business Systems has a phenomenal reputation for its knowledge in implementing contact center solutions. Their domain expertise and access in EMEA combined with our joint sales and marketing efforts will allow us to bring unparalleled technology and service to our collective base.”

“ClickFox is a leader in customer experience analytics and Business Systems is known as the premier voice technology services organization in EMEA,” said Ventana Research Vice President and Research Director for Customer and Contact Centers, Richard Snow. “This partnership will leverage their accomplishments at numerous U.S.- and EMEA-based companies to bring customer experience analytics within the reach of companies in EMEA.This will allow companies to address one of today’s critical business issues – understanding the experience of their customers regardless of what channel they use to interact with the company.”

Read the full press release here.

In a recent blog post VP & Research Director at Ventana Research, Richard Snow, recommended taking a look at what the ClickFox product can do to help you optimize the customer experience across channels and take a key step to supporting customer performance management. He also writes about a recent piece of research he just finished, where the majority of companies said it was important for them to track interactions across channels, however closer examination of the products they use suggests that they are not able to track whether an interaction began on one channel and continued on one or more alternative channels.

In recognition that customers are now using multiple channels, ClickFox has enhanced the product to capture usage data from a whole variety of additional channels, e-mail, chat, the web, point of sales terminals, and kiosks. Using a unique customer identifier, the product is able to bring all this data together and create a view of what channels a customer has used and how they navigated from one to another in order to resolve their issue. Just as for IVR, this information is displayed in highly graphical formats that allow companies to visualize what customers actually experience. Furthermore, the data is analysed in different ways to support companies trying to improve operational efficiency, increase customer satisfaction, or increase customer retention.

For further reading, click here to download our Customer Experience Analytics White Paper.

DMG Consulting recently published a report titled “Contact Center Analytics: Emerging Customer Experience and Desktop Analytics Solutions” in which they help contact center and IT decision makers identify, assess and select the right analytical applications for their contact centers. It also “debunks” some of the claims about these emerging technology sectors by providing an in-depth analysis of what they are and are not capable of doing.

As part of this broad industry report DMG profiles several companies, including ClickFox. The ClickFox Company Report in now available for download from our resource section.

We recently announced another event in the ClickFox Webinar Series. Here are the details:

Today’s customers have a variety of preferences and expectations that make managing customer experience data complex. The comprehensive customer experience is defined by the collective interactions they have with the enterprise, and the ability to analyze these interactions enables a company to proactively provide an optimal experience at every touch point.

Register today!

Join ClickFox and featured guest Adele Sage of Forrester Research for a complimentary webinar:

Delivering an Integrated Customer Experience:
Best Practices in Cross-Channel Design & Analysis

ClickFox will also preview three new solution offerings — CEA Service Optimization , CEA Customer Retention and CEA Customer Modeling — each addressing strategic organizational goals.

Speakers:
Marco Pacelli, CEO of ClickFox, and Anna Convery, CMO of ClickFox, will overview ClickFox CEA (Customer Experience Analytics), a unique software solution that models information from all customer interactions across the enterprise — Contact Center, IVR, call routing, website, chat, retail/POS, mobile devices, email, and more. CEA provides insights and recommendations that enable a company to successfully balances two mission critical goals: providing customers with productive, satisfying experiences, and leveraging cost effective customer service options.

Featured Guest:
Adele Sage, Analyst with Forrester Research will discuss Best Practices in Cross-Channel Design, delving into why customers become dissatisfied as they navigate across channels, and why lack of consistency, continuity and insight into cross channel experience is impacting customer experience. Adele will share the current state of cross-channel analysis and experience, best practices in cross-channel design, and how companies can use this opportunity to differentiate themselves with a seamless, integrated cross-channel experience.

When:
April 30, 2009 – 2:00pm-3:00pm EST

Who Should Attend:
CIOs, CMOs, VPs and Directors of Customer Care, Customer Service, Customer Experience, Claims

Register today!

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.