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.

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.

About the Book:

Agile Development and Business Goals describes a unique, state-of-the-art methodology that aligns the critical but often “silo-ed” software development process with core company goals. Eschewing long-winded “agile philosophy” in favor of a formally prioritized process, this book serves as a distilled learning guide for managing technical resources in a manner that directly boosts your bottom line. Build the teams, define the roles, acquire the tools, and deliver your world-class software on time and on budget.

About the Authors:

Bill Holtsnider is an experienced writer, educator, and software professional with more than 26 years of experience working in the computer industry. His IT expertise includes working in such diverse areas as stock portfolio management, identity management, and software development. He is the author of six books and a wide range of technical and marketing documentation.

Tom Wheeler has a long track record of building organizations to develop commercial software, including products for financial services and contact centers. He has built, sold and been a senior manager in a variety of different types of companies, including international conglomerates and garage-sized start ups. He first created the Six Week Solution back in the 1980′s and has been fine-tuning it since.

George Stragand is a manager and software developer with over 20 years of producing and managing the delivery of commercial software on time. He has worked for companies ranging in size from startups to multinationals, creating software both for external and in-house use. He still hasn’t found a problem which couldn’t be solved by one more level of indirection or a suitable amount of explosives in the correct location.

Joseph Gee has spent the last 10 years of his career leading and coaching teams through a variety of successful projects and Agile transitions. His advocacy for software craftsmanship has equipped teams for success in small custom shops, large telecom enterprise systems, commercial shrink-wrap modeling software, and, most recently, cutting edge behavioral analytics.

The book is now in stock at Amazon.com.

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.

Today we announced the release of a new book being published July 7^th, Agile Development and Business Goals: The Six Week Solution. The book is authored by Bill Holtsnider, Joseph Gee, George Stragand and Tom Wheeler; four of the company’s visionary software developers behind the pioneering customer experience analytics (CEA) software and solutions. The book goes beyond theory and academia to offer a practical guide for aligning software development processes with core business goals.

Tom Wheeler, VP of Research and Development at ClickFox says about the book:

“I have applied the knowledge and best practices in this book to launch innovative, business-driven enterprise software solutions like customer experience analytics (CEA). I think developers will appreciate the fact that this book speaks their language, and does so in the context of their role in driving strategic goals for the organization.”

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com.

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

Laurie Olivier, a ClickFox board member and one of its first investors, was honored this week at the 2010 Eagle Star Award Gala by the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce Southeast Region (AICC). The Eagle Star Gala is AICC’s community flagship event that honors the people and companies who have contributed most to the Southeast-Israel business relationship.

Mr. Olivier, a native of South Africa is the Atlanta-based partner of Veritas Venture Partners (Israel’s oldest VC firm) and has been involved in venture capital since 1990. As Senior Business Development Manager and SVP Private Equity at Anglo American (AA), a leading global mining concern, he represents AA’s interests in a number of venture funds, including the AAV fund managed by Veritas. He serves on the boards various AAV portfolio companies. Mr. Olivier was also a board member of MCPEPA (an East Asian private equity fund) and MCA (a South African fund – Chairman of the Investment Committee). At AA, he pioneered the establishment of new technology-driven businesses, and serves on the boards of a variety of publicly traded and privately held businesses, including Anglo American Industrial Corporation Ltd., CytoDome and ClickFox. Mr. Olivier holds a B.Engineering (Electronics) from the University of Pretoria, and a B.Com (Hons) and diploma in Datametrics from the University of South Africa.

In the professional community he is a board member of the Atlanta Venture Forum, and has worked closely with Georgia Tech on establishing relations with the University of Pretoria. But it was at the American-Israel Chamber of Commerce that Laurie devoted his considerable talents and expertise. As chairman of the Telecommunications Committee, he transformed the Chamber into a leader in cable industry technologies through the US-Israel Broadband Business Exchanges, events that generated many business relationships including two that won the Eagle Star Deal of the Year awards, and were the catalyst for several Israeli companies to establish their US operations in Atlanta.

Laurie rose through the executive leadership of AICC, ultimately serving as Board chairman from 2007-2009. Upon completion of his two terms, he served as the chairman and volunteer facilitator of the organization’s new strategic plan that will guide AICC for the next two years.

Congratulations Laurie!

ClickFox CMO Anna Convery lead an expert panel of call center executives from Delta, Intercontinental Hotels Group, Equifax and Liberty Mutual in a lively discussion of contact center optimization best practices at Tuesday’s CRMA/ATA breakfast panel titled “Recession-Proofing Your Contact Center” in Atlanta. Panelists pointed to initiatives like analytics, work-at-home agent programs and incenting executives on customer experience improvements as key in driving more efficient, effective contact center operations.