ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

In the beginning there was complete chaos. Companies were focused on their products and their bottom line and the customer was just a mere afterthought. But eventually competition caught up with everyone and nobody was safe. Customers had more options and they wanted to be treated well or they would just walk away. The idea that an organization actually had a relationship with its customers was quite revolutionary at the time and companies realized that they needed some way to manage those relationships. And so, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications surfaced and an entire industry was created to help companies wrap their arms around these new technologies and methodologies. CRM was and still is a complex solution and has become fragmented across the organization. There are several flavors of CRM (Operational, Sales Force Automation, Analytical, Campaign Management and recently, talks of Social CRM) and many vendors battling for market share in an economy that is tough on spending. And spending on complex, long implementations is not something that people enjoy. About a decade ago a new term, Customer Experience Management (CEM) was coined in the marketplace. Where CRM focused on how the company tracks the information it has on its customers, CEM put the focus on the customers themselves. The customer was no longer a byproduct but rather the main focus of the company. The experiences were a new source of information for the company in a competitive environment. They could be mined and dissected in order to give the company actionable insights from interactions. CEM became an industry standard and a hot topic. But CEM was, and still is, focused around customer-to-agent interactions and in today's market that's just not enough. Customers have more ways to interact with a company than ever before. Customers expect to have the best experience every time they reach out and interact with a company. Every time and in any way. And the industry is starting to evolve and look at other interaction methods. So lately, CEM has slowly morphed into Contact Center Performance Management (CCPM). But there's a bigger issue. These customer interactions are usually analyzed in a silo or even worse, in a vacuum. However, interactions don't occur in a vacuum, they are actually part of a timeline. Something happens before, between and after these interactions. Only when you put together all these events can you start to understand the true customers' experience, from their point of view. So that's where Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) comes in. CEA is the next step in the evolution of understanding the customer experience. Seeing the experience through the eyes of the customers allows a company to match the customers with the way the want to be treated. Customers has a unique behavioral DNA and specific behavior patterns. Would they rather use the website to pay a bill but feel more comfortable talking to a live agent when they need a new card? Would they rather deposit a check at an ATM or with a live teller inside the branch? Is there a specific segment of your customer base that would rather do one over the other? CEA allows a company to look at every interaction individually at every touch-point and combine them all into a comaplete experience. It exposes customer behavior patterns that are very difficult to understand otherwise. CEA enables a company to engage their customers like never before and provide them with the most delightful experience possible that match their needs. The silos are gone! Viva la evolution! Click here to read more about how your company can make the move from contact center to contact centric and how Customer Experience Analytics can complement and leverage your existing CCPM solution.