ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

There’s been some recent media coverage of ClickFox that we wanted to share with our blog readers.

First off, we had a great time at SpeechTEK 2010, participated in a couple of panels and presentation and met some interesting attendants at the exhibit hall and the networking event. Our VP of Business Development was interviewed on BnetTV.com and you can view that video here:

Next up is a fantastic article in Contact Center Pipeline Magazine that discusses why consistent service delivery across channels requires a unified view of the customer that breaks down departmental barriers. We’ll have a lot more on this topic in upcoming weeks but to get your started you can read the article here: Multichannel Feedback (PDF).

ClickFox was also mentioned in a couple of recent articles by one of our board members, Geoff Oblak, and his company Ascent Venture Partners. In the first article over at The Motley Fool, Mr. Oblak talks about why Data Intelligence Is the Next Big Thing. In a another article on ReadWriteWeb, they try to pick the brain of Matt Fates, a partner at Ascent Venture Partners to see what’s Inside the Mind of an Early Stage Venture Capitalist.

Don’t forget to download a complimentary copy (an $895 value) of a Datamonitor/Ovum report that discusses the complex customer interaction landscape, and explains why ClickFox is addressing cross-channel analytics “in the most valuable way for enterprises”. The report is available for a limited time, so hurry over and download it here.

1to1 Media’s Executive Business Editor Tom Hoffman has a video segment called ‘Hoffman’s Hot Seat’ where he sits down with today’s business leaders to discuss the latest trends in customer strategy and tactics. In this week’s hot seat he interviewed ClickFox CMO, Anna Convery, at the Gartner 360 conference in a segment titled “Best Practices for Applying Customer Experience Analytics:”

Customer-centric companies are trying to learn as much as they can from their customers’ experiences in order to more effectively meet their needs and maximize business opportunities with them. ClickFox Chief Marketing Officer Anna Convery shares her recommendations on using customer experience analytics to make the most out of each customer interaction.

Below is the interview  in its entirety (click here if you’re reading this via an email subscription):

Anna was also quoted today in a 1to1 Magazine article titled “Turning Up the Voice of the Customer” where she discussed how new unstructured sources of customer feedback can provide a deeper level of customer insight when integrated with more traditional, structured VoC data:

“Customers are different and have different ways of expressing satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a company,” says Anna Convery, chief marketing officer of analytics firm ClickFox. New interaction channels help companies understand customer activity and reach people who don’t give feedback through traditional channels.

Read the full article here.

Summer is a usually the time when horror movies hit the theaters. With #FrustrationFridays, a weekly Twitter meme and blog column we share some of the worst customer experience nightmares we received in our Customer Tipping Point Survey.

Here are a few more horror stories and our Customer Experience takeaways:

I was having problems downloading a ring tone to my son’s cell phone from the web so I called customer support. They said I couldn’t do it from the phone or web because I had blocked the ability to download anything, yet they were charging me for supposed downloads that I don’t think were done. It turned into a huge circular argument. It was clear the agent had no clue what the web experience was, and worse, had no concern that his instructions weren’t feasible. I have tried escalating with this company before for other issues which only led to additional frustrations. Unfortunately, they have the best network coverage. I have switched service providers before but had to switch back. i am stuck, but frankly, I think all phone companies suck at customer service. I just stick to using my phone for calls and texts so I don’t give them reason for overcharging me for things. I’d be spending more money if I trusted them.

Customer Experience Takeaway: Break down those analytics silos and empower your agents to see every step of the customer experience. A call center agent who has no idea what happened to a customer on the website is going to cause a lot of frustration. We had an excellent webinar with Adele Sage of Forrester Research where she discusses best practices in cross-channel design. Click here to watch a replay of the webinar “Delivering an Integrated Cross Channel Experience.”

What I particularly dislike is a credit card payment process that forces you to push buttons to answer irrelevant questions accept/decline additional offers, or you cannot complete the transaction. When this happens I usually throw it back to the clerk, tell them I won’t participate, and ask them to make it get to the end.

Customer Experience Takeaway: Don’t force customers to go down the up-sell/cross-sell path when they don’t want to. By understanding customer behavior through segmentation and past experiences you can engage them better by allowing them to go down their ideal path. Nobody wants to take detours when they’re in a rush, so don’t add irrelevant questions and extra steps to their experience.

A reputed airline company charging me twice for the same ticket. Fortunately I had booked the tickets with my credit card, so I went ahead and disputed the second charge. The airline company declined – I fought it for over 6 months to get my money back. Not flying that airline anymore.

Customer Experience Takeaway: Check the facts! These sort of disputes are easy to track down and resolve. There has to be an electronic paper trail that will confirm the customers’ grievance without upsetting them and forcing them to defect to your competition. The travel industry, which is highly competitive, is plagued with these sorts of stories. Our survey, while not focused specifically on airlines, got a lot of responses about double booking, hidden fees and other similar issues that caused customers to swear off using these companies’ services again.

Do you have a customer experience horror story to share? Leave us a comment or tweet about it with the #FrustrationFridays tag and we’ll include it in our next column. Have a great 4th of July weekend!

On Tuesday, ClickFox’s customer, Sprint, received the prestigious Gartner & 1to1 Media Gold CRM Excellence Award for outstanding customer strategies that produce impressive business results. Below is an excerpt from 1to1 Media’s Customer Centricity Wins article titled “Sprint Nextel’s Leadership Makes Customer Experience a Top Priority.” The article goes into further detail about how the telecommunications company has improved retention and service levels while cutting costs:

Partnering with ClickFox, Sprint began to analyze cross-channel behavior trends and issues of each segment to see customers’ complete paths across all service touch-points. This helps to flag customers who require targeted support, whose contracts are about to expire, and the like.

The company integrates many of its supporting customer service solutions providers through its cross-channel analytics platform, including Merced’s performance management suite, Sprint’s internal CRM system, and Enkata’s first-contact resolution tools. Doing so provides Sprint with a centralized view of its customers, which is fed with customer satisfaction, CRM, and churn data to identify hidden connections between interactions and customer loyalty, and to help plan marketing campaigns and determine website content. Sprint can correlate customer satisfaction results with churn data to understand the direct impact of poor scores on a customer’s likelihood to leave, as well as on future buying patterns.

This cross-channel analysis has led to never-before-seen insights into customer pain points driving dissatisfaction and churn. For example, Sprint uncovered an issue preventing many customers from activating new phones via self-service. Customers who were unable to successfully activate their phones transferred to live agents who weren’t empowered to handle the issue, so customers were referred to the retail store. This resulted in customer returning phones and canceling service plans.

The entire article is available here (no registration required).

Sprint was recognized today for their enterprise-wide vision and commitment to the customer experience as the Gold winner of the 2010 Gartner & 1to1 Media Customer Relationship Management Excellence Award in the Customer Experience category. These awards highlight innovative companies that impact value through their customer relationship strategy and demonstrate excellence in delivering the customer experience.

Sprint leverages ClickFox CEA to analyze customer experience behavior trends across interaction channels, including retail stores, web, call center, IVR, and CTI routing applications. This single, powerful view of the customer is tied to customer satisfaction and customer churn data to identify hidden connections between interactions and customer loyalty for dramatically improved satisfaction and retention.

Bob Johnson, Sprint’s Chief Service Officer, says:

“The award is gratifying and a reflection of Sprint’s work over the last few years to improve the quality and consistency of our customer interactions. ClickFox, one of our important partners in this process, provided us with key insight needed to drive measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention.”

Marco Pacelli, ClickFox’s CEO, congratulated Sprint on this prestigious award and says:

“Sprint has demonstrated what it truly means to be customer-centric by elevating customer experience to be a strategic, enterprise-wide initiative. They are one of several progressive Fortune 500 companies leveraging cross-channel analytics, and ClickFox is proud to be a part of their commitment to revolutionizing the complete, end-to-end customer experience.”

Read the full press release here.

The report, which describes ClickFox as the “most prominent” vendor in the contact center market, notes that consumer behavior is changing with the emergence of newer service channels like web and mobile: “The rapid uptake of web-based collaboration tools such as social media make understanding customer behavior across all channels a crucial part of the effort to provide stellar customer experiences.” Ovum analyst, Aphrodite Brinsmead, also notes that “A greater number of customer touchpoints has created pressure for enterprises to create consistent experiences across multiple channels. In order to increase satisfaction rates and improve first contact resolution, enterprises must provide relevant information at the initial point of contact. Cross-channel analytics are increasingly important to understand customer preferences and adapt services appropriately.”

Brinsmead points to the limitations of surveys and other analytics tools in delivering complete insight into customer experience: “Although there are a number of ways to measure customer satisfaction, including surveys and speech analytics, these tools do not relate different channel interactions from the same customer.” The report notes that “[ClickFox] aggregates data from all possible points of contact between a customer and an organization” to track consumer patterns and predict future behavior. This insight enables organizations to deliver more cost-effective, satisfying experiences tailored to their customer’s unique needs, regardless of the channel used.

For a limited time, you can download the report here.

You can also download a Forrester Research about Real-Time Analytics for Contact Centers which singles out ClickFox’s unique capabilities (available for a limited time as well).

Click here to register for our upcoming webinar with Forrester’s Vice President and Principal Analyst which takes place this Thursday, the 10th of June at 1pm EST.

ClickFox today announced that it will host an industry webinar featuring Forrester Research, Inc. Vice President and Principal Analyst, Elizabeth Herrell on Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 1:00 pm Eastern. The complimentary webinar, “What Consumers Really Want”, will present the findings from recent online surveys where consumers answered questions about their interaction preferences and most frustrating customer service issues. Herrell will draw on her recent report, “Real-Time Analytics for Contact Centers,” to discuss how organizations today can leverage customer experience analytics to gain valuable insight into customer behaviors and attitudes.

When: Thursday, June 10, 2010 at 1:00 pm Eastern

Presenters: Anna Convery, ClickFox CMO; Featured Guest: Elizabeth Herrell, VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research, Inc.

Who Should Attend: Mid to senior-level customer experience, customer care, contact center, and customer loyalty executives, sales and marketing executives, CIOs, C-level executives

What: Attendees will learn how applying a cross-channel approach to analytics can deliver never-before-seen opportunities for reducing operational costs and improving the complete customer experience. ClickFox will present several powerful case studies illustrating the impact of cross-channel insight in driving huge gains like saving an organization over $45 million in contact center costs, and reducing customer churn by 8% in a little over one year.

Why: Herrell points to a lack of meaningful customer data as a major challenge for contact centers. “Most metrics that report on an agent’s call handling do not report on the customer’s experience while navigating multiple contact center channels, such as IVRs, email, and the Web,” according to the report. “Although typical reporting practices segment data from separate channels, they don’t reveal the entire story of the customer’s experience.”

Register: http://www.clickfox.com/blog/061010CB

ClickFox is one of several vendors featured in a recent Forrester Research report titled “Real Time Analytics for Contact Centers” which points at a lack of meaningful customer data as a major challenge for contact centers. According to the report:

“Most metrics that report on an agent’s call handling do not report on the customer’s experience while navigating multiple contact center channels, such as IVRs, email, and the Web. Although typical reporting practices segment data from separate channels, they don’t reveal the entire story of the customer’s experience.”

Speaking specifically about ClickFox, the report says:

“ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics offers a unique capability with its Task Analysis engine that examines key customer activities and adds its Artificial Intelligence engine to identify discrepancies between system design and actual interactions across multiple channels to provide meaningful insight.”

Register to download the complete report here.

We had a fantastic turnout yesterday for our webinar titled “Understand Your Customers as Individuals, Not Individual Transaction” in which Bruce Temkin of Forrester and ClickFox CMO, Anna Convery, discussed how best-in-class companies are applying a cross-channel approach to customer experience.

To view the replay of the event, click here.

We are currently compiling the questions from the event’s Q&A session and will share them separately in a future post. If you have any questions after watching the webinar please let us know in the comments section.

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”.