ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

Bob Thompson, founder and CEO of CustomerThink, recently interviewed the VP of Customer Experience at Sprint and mentioned ClickFox’s part in helping understand the complete cross-channel experience during the interview. It’s an interesting interview that touches on how large organizations are embracing customer experience at the executive level and what impact customer experience analytics has on operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and churn rates.

Interview topics include (from CustomerThink):

Role and empowerment of VP of Customer Experience position
What were the big customer experience problems uncovered?
What drives real (un-trapped) customer loyalty for Sprint customers?
How did Sprint justify the improvements needed and measure its progress?
What changes resulted in the recent improvements in ACSI scores?
What is the role of technology to identify problems?
Three critical elements for success in Customer Experience leadership

You can hear the question about ClickFox and it’s impact at around the 23 minute mark:

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Read more about how Sprint leveraged CEA to earn top industry honors (PDF).

In our last survey on customer tipping points, consumers told us where companies fail at meeting their expectations and how they react to poor customer service.  Since we now know what makes them tick, we’re going to find out what companies are doing right.

Take our simple, 3-minute survey and tell us what companies are doing to meet or exceed your expectations.  Does a good customer experience influence your brand perceptions and purchasing decisions?

Simply provide us with your email address at the end of the survey, and you’ll be entered into a drawing to win a free Apple® iPad!

Once we tabulate all the results, you’ll get a sneak peak at what best-in-class companies are doing to delight customers to the tune of increased satisfaction, loyalty and profitablilty.

Please click here to participate in our survey.

Thank you in advance,

-The ClickFox Customer Experience Analysis Team

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.

Here’s your chance to meet us in person. ClickFox will be at SpeechTEK, the premier speech technology conference and exhibition, August 2 – 4 in New York. Attendees can visit ClickFox in Booth #609 to see the latest developments at ClickFox, including groundbreaking products, industry research, and multi-million dollar customer success stories.

ClickFox will debut their latest solution, ClickFox Pulse, the first executive dashboard application for customer experience. Pulse answers the demand for executives to gain direct, easy access to key customer experience metrics and insight, and is the first product of its kind that measures the financial impact of today’s complex customer experience on the organization. Attendees will be able to see live demos of Pulse in the SpeechTEK Analytics Lab on Monday, August 2nd, and at the ClickFox booth throughout the exhibition.

ClickFox will offer industry thought leadership and share best practices as part of SpeechTEK’s analytics track, focusing on ‘advanced analytics’ as a way to not only deliver insight into the customer experience, but also to predict future behavior, like propensity to buy, and likelihood to churn.

ClickFox will also cover the recent Gartner & 1to1 CRM Excellence award won by their customer, Sprint. Attendees can learn how Sprint’s enterprise-wide approach to customer experience has driven the most improved customer satisfaction rankings across all industries over the last two years.

Attendees can schedule private demos and appointments by visiting http://web.clickfox.com/contact-us.

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.

Last week we started up #FrustrationFridays, a weekly Twitter meme and column where we share some of the worst customer experience stories we received in our Customer Tipping Point Survey. Here are some more horror stories and our Customer Experience takeaways:

For 4 continuous years, I was a customer of this large phone company for my landline under the same price plan. A couple of their reps came home proposing us to change to a new plan saying that it was cheaper. The next month bill showed that it was actually higher (hidden fees, extra charges, etc.) When we called the phone company to revert us back to our old plan, they said that it was not available. So after 4 years, we ditched the phone company the very next month. They did try to win us back with some temporary offers, but we refused them.

Customer Experience Takeaway: Don’t try to pull a bait-and-switch on your customers, especially if you’re in a highly competitive industry. Don’t change your services or pricing without ample notification and don’t force your customers to pay more for something they are used to. Our survey showed that 5% of respondents where frustrated the most about fees and price increases. 18.5% said phone companies are the most frustrating to deal with.

buildup of bad experiences…one isn’t enough but 3 or 4, well, enough is enough. example is a bank. Self service site (online payments) was terrible. One type of payment (mortgage) remembered my payment info. Another type of payment (Line of Credit) did not. If there was no activity on my savings account for a certain period, it would simply stop displaying when I logged in. I had electronic billig (no paper statements) but if I forgot my password, security qeustions were all about things on my statement (which I couldn’t access buecause it was purely electronic). I call the care #, just to be transferred 15 minutes later. the in-person service was equally poor when I attempted to refinance inside the bank. When I tried to pay a large lump sum on my line of credit, it would not allow payments over a certain amount (online) or more than 1 payment…i was forced to call and sit on hold just to make my payment…I’m refinancing and going to another bank that actually makes things easy

Customer Experience Takeaway: Offer a seamless customer experience through all your interaction channels. Many companies still operate and analyze customer experience through informational silos which causes their customers to have a considerably different experiences like the one described above. The website needs to have the same functionality as the phone channel and the in-person experience. And don’t force frustrating limitations unless there are regulatory or compliance reasons, in which case you should try to provide easy access to live support. 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.”

I had finally taken the plunge and switched cable operators. The new company’s sales rep had been to my house twice, and finally I signed the contract. On the day of installation the service tech told me there would be an extra charge because one of my rooms was slightly detached from the house (according to him). I explained that their rep had seen the house and signed me to a contract which was legally binding on both sides. He insisted I had to pay more. I complained to their customer service with the tech still there, but she agreed with the tech about the extra charge. I asked to speak to her manager, she said he would call back (I am still waiting). I decided not to sue them, and just went back to my old cable provider. I will never do business with them again, and delight in telling all my friends why.

Customer Experience Takeaway: Keep your promises! Does the lifetime value of a customer outweigh a small additional extra installation charge? When you already have a tech on site? No it doesn’t. Instead of acquiring a happy new customer, this cable company managed to lose money because not only did they lose the customer but they already dispatched a technician to do the installation. Our survey found that cable companies are the most frustrating to deal with (26%) and that rude or inexperienced representatives or service technicians are the second most cause of frustration (13%).

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 weekend!

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

• Latest ClickFox News
• ClickFox’s Webinar Series
• Did You Know?
• R&D Team Publishes Agile Development Book
• CEAi and Survey Results
• Upcoming Events – SpeechTEK 2010
• Free Downloads

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