ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

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!

Last week, during our webinar ‘What Consumers Really Want‘, we shared the results from our recent survey about customer tipping points.

Overall, the findings point to the powerful relationship between customer experience and revenue and highlight a critical need for companies to stop looking at service operations as cost centers, and instead view every interaction as an opportunity to increase satisfaction, build loyalty, and grow revenue. The following report details the findings and analysis of the survey results, and highlights what this valuable customer insight means for today’s enterprise.

Click here to read the Customer Tipping Point Survey Results.

We also invite you to read our previous Customer Interaction Survey Results or view our recent webinar replay.

We’d like to thanks everyone who participated in the survey for their time. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

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

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.

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.

ClickFox hosted an excellent webinar event yesterday titled “The Hundred-Million Self Service Question” which is now available for replay. Click the link to find out what the answer is:

The answer to this question is right under your nose and contained in your customers’ everyday transaction data history – from kiosks, web site, and IVR systems. Join us to learn how several top-tier organizations reported $200MM cost savings after they discovered the specific areas driving self-service failure and increased live agent calls – simply by analyzing customers’ paths across the multiple channels they interact with.

To view the entire webinar replay, click here.

To view all our other webinars (and there are a lot of them to chose from), visit our download library.

Yesterday’s webinar about Customer Experience Analytics in Finance is now available for replay:

Today’s financial services providers are driven to discover new and innovative ways to reduce costs while simultaneously improving customer experience to remain competitive. Join ClickFox, the pioneering leader in customer experience analytics to learn how the nation’s leading financial services providers realized hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings by analyzing the paths of their customers.

Watch the webinar replay now!

Today’s financial services providers are driven to discover new and innovative ways to reduce costs while simultaneously improving customer experience to remain competitive. Join ClickFox, the pioneering leader in customer experience analytics, at 1:00 pm on Thursday, October 29th to learn how the nation’s leading financial services providers realized hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings by analyzing the paths of their customers to:

• Increase online and self-service transaction efficiency to deflect more calls away from agents
• Streamline authentication process for quicker account holder verification and fewer transfers
• Improve task flow processes to increase CSAT scores across channels

Attendees will learn how to leverage their existing investments in data warehousing, CRM and BI tools to gain a complete view of the customer experience, enabling targeted improvement strategies that have an immediate impact on operating costs and customer satisfaction and loyalty. Some of the nation’s most respected banking, credit card and investment organizations turn to ClickFox to transform the paths of their customers into multi-million dollar insights – register now to see how we can help you on the path to full, cross-channel customer experience excellence in 2010.

Increased competition within today’s marketplace and customer demand for diverse communication methods means that companies must address customer experience across all available service channels to stay profitable. However, traditional approaches only provide a one-dimensional view into customer behavior patterns, offering little to no insight into retention opportunities.

ClickFox, the leader in cross-channel customer experience analytics, shows how one of the nation’s largest service providers was able to save over 1,500 customers per month by analyzing specific behavior patterns leading to dissatisfaction and churn. ClickFox CEA delivers a powerful view of customer experience across all touch points, enabling companies to proactively respond with highly effective, customer-centric retention strategies.

Learn how several world-class organizations across industries are using ClickFox CEA to:

• Gain insight into which specific customer experiences lead to negative and positive CSAT scores
• Understand the relationship between low CSAT scores and customer churn behavior
• Discover how to predict and proactively respond to potential churn with highly effective customer-centric retention efforts
• Implement targeted improvement strategies based on comprehensive customer insight across all channels

Watch the Webinar Replay now!

On October 1st, at 1pm EST, we will host a webinar titled “Dramatically Reduce Customer Churn and Build Loyalty with Customer Experience Analytics:”

Increased competition within today’s marketplace and customer demand for diverse communication methods means that companies must address customer experience across all available service channels to stay profitable. However, traditional approaches only provide a one-dimensional view into customer behavior patterns, offering little to no insight into retention opportunities.

Join us to hear how one of the nation’s largest service providers was able to save over 1,500 customers per month by analyzing specific behavior patterns leading to dissatisfaction and churn. ClickFox CEA delivers a powerful view of customer experience across all touch points, enabling companies to proactively respond with highly effective, customer-centric retention strategies.

Attendees will learn how several world-class organizations across industries are using ClickFox CEA to:

• Gain insight into which specific customer experiences lead to negative and positive CSAT scores
• Understand and quantify the relationship between low CSAT scores and likelihood of customer churn
• Implement targeted process and retention strategies based on comprehensive customer insight across all channels

Limited seats are available – reserve your seat today.