The ClickFox Blog

FierceFinance Big Data (Free) Webinar is This Thursday

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

ClickFox CEO, Marco Pacelli, will be one of the hosts on this Thursday's FierceFinance Webinar, where he will be discussing how big data is reshaping financial services:

“The sheer volume of transactions, interactions and account data makes it increasingly difficult for banks to get timely insights into trends impacting business issues,” said Pacelli. “At ClickFox, we’re enabling financial services organizations to bring order to the complex maze of data that’s been collected for years, and assembling disparate pieces of transactions and interactions to draw a complete intuitive picture.”

Be sure to join us on Thursday!

When: Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012 from 2 to 3 p.m. EST

Released: White Paper by AnyPresence on Mobile Apps in Utilities

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Shortly after we published our market brief on mobile apps for customer service and engagement (also see our infographic) we got in touch with AnyPresence which is a leading mobile platform that decreases the cost and complexity of multi-device application development, deployment, and maintenance. The platform allows non-technical users the ability to assemble and deploy HTML5, iOS, and Android apps without having to write code or install any software. Pretty cool stuff.

So when they decided to quote us in their recent (terrific) white paper on mobile apps in utilities we felt our readers would benefit from reading it too. You can download a free copy of the white paper here.

Let us know what you think in the comments?

Consumer Tipping Point Survey Results Published [Infographic]

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

At the end of 2011 we surveyed consumers to see what frustrates them the most when it comes to interacting with companies across various industries. This market brief presents the findings of the second annual consumer tipping points survey, which reveals what customer service issues frustrate consumers the most, and how they respond to negative experiences. We examined trends year-over-year to understand how customer expectations and perceptions are changing, and the hard-hitting impact to satisfaction, loyalty and revenue for businesses.

People Experience

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

CNBC recently aired a feature titled “Customer (Dis) Service”, a program that took viewers through the evolution of customer care and described the current state of customer service relationships as “wrecked, shattered and ruined”. As initiatives like automation and outsourcing were widely implemented to curb the costs of servicing customers, experience took a major hit. So where are companies most often not meeting customer needs?

Surprisingly even with the evolution of interaction channels that now include web, chat, mobile apps, social media and more, consumers still seem to value pretty basic tenets of service. ClickFox just conducted its second annual Consumer Tipping Points survey to discover the impact of poor customer experience, and the results support the network’s take: in 2010 and 2011, respondents chose “having to speak with multiple people/not getting what they wanted on the first try” and “rude or inexperienced service technicians” as the most frustrating service areas. Even in this digital age of the consumer, people still value efficient, convenient, quality service from the people delivering customer-facing support. During “Customer (Dis) Service”, CNBC pointed to a bright spot: industry leader ING credits its happy customers with happy employees who are all committed to building and deepening customer relationships. Longtime ClickFox client Sprint has seen extraordinary gains in JD Power, ACSI and internal satisfaction rankings due to an enterprise-wide focus on customer experience that extends far beyond the contact center walls to foster a culture where everyone is incented on CRM improvements. While both success stories involve focusing on the traditional ‘voice of the customer’, they also incorporate the ‘voice of the employee’, underscoring the importance of their critical role in relationships.

For organizations to truly be customer-centric, they must include employees in the process – Carl Lyon of the QoE (Quality of Experience Company), is exploring how this new ecosystem of stakeholders fits together to drive experience-focused decision-making across the enterprise and existing sources of data. Check out a video of Carl discussing an inside-out approach to tackling multi-channel challenges and the role of analytics in transforming customer experience.

Mobile Apps for Customer Service and Engagement

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

The explosion of mobile apps has created a huge demand from smartphone users and given organizations a fresh new revenue stream as they inform, engage, market and sell to tech-savvy consumers. Mobile apps provide a unique platform for companies to build their brands, increase customer engagement and loyalty and increase competitive advantage, but they also can serve as another customer service touch point like the web or contact center, empowering customers with convenient, on-the-go self-service features.

So how do companies today leverage this unique new touch point and create customer-centric mobile apps that drive more loyal, profitable relationships? Our survey revealed consumer perceptions about mobile apps, including frequency of usage, buying behavior, differences among device providers and likelihood to use for customer service purposes.

Click here to download the Mobile Apps for Customer Service survey results.

New CEAi Infographic: Repeat Contact Behavior and Costs

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

One of the benefits of having an interaction cloud with billions of customer behavior patterns is that we can aggregate it to find interesting stories. This infographic illustrates variations in customer behavior across the US for nationwide wireless providers – analysis revealed that customer in some states are more likely to contact their provider more than once, driving up service costs for the organization.

Do you agree with this analysis? Find the state you live in and think back about your repeat calls to your wireless provider? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Head over to our CEAi page to find more interesting insights and stay tuned for additional infographics in the future.

CEO’s Article on Business Insider: Marketing’s Role In The Customer Experience Ecosystem

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

ClickFox CEO, Marco Pacelli, has a new column over at Business Insider. We’ll be sure to cross-post his articles here as well. Enjoy!

Marketing’s Role In The Customer Experience Ecosystem

We’ve all done it: called a company about a product or service only to navigate through an endless voice system. Perhaps after that we fired off an email to customer service and then we got online to chat with a service representative. Then as a last resort, we hit our social media channels to blast our comments to anyone who will listen. Will a truck arrive with a smartly dressed service technician or is this just another entry into the customer service abyss?

I recently sat down with Rob Strickland, president of Strickland Consulting and former CIO of T-Mobile USA, to get his thoughts on how organizations can and should be using marketing to help drive customer satisfaction and engagement.

Marco: Do you think organizations today are missing the boat on providing a positive customer experience?

Rob: I believe customer experiences are like footprints in the sand; as fast as they are made they are quickly washed away. This results in a lack of information to determine the level of your customers’ satisfaction. Companies must learn to cement those footsteps to record which customer experiences lead to increased satisfaction, loyalty, higher campaign response rates and sales. Tracking the customer experience is especially useful when developing a marketing campaign. Companies must constantly listen to consumers– across all touch points– to analyze their behavior and respond quickly to changing needs.

Marco: Where should these organizations focus to improve customer satisfaction and the overall experience?

Rob: Today’s marketers have many approaches to measure campaign and outreach effectiveness, including Web and e-commerce analytics, market research and focus groups. However, marketers are missing deep insight into the actual behavior of consumers, which can tell them how customer response rates and buying habits are influenced by the company’s marketing initiatives. For marketing to drive customer engagement and deliver the end-to-end customer experience, it must have ongoing visibility to all experiences.

Marco: What tools should companies be using to gain visibility into these experiences?

Rob: Traditional marketing tools can provide great metrics, but often the volume of data is simply too large for consumer brands, such as telcos, banks and cable companies, to digest and see how a breakdown in one area of the business is affecting another. It’s important to look at each channel your customers use to interact with your company – Web, phone, in-store, interactive voice response (IVR), Facebook, etc. – then create a holistic marketing plan that anticipates customer frustrations and allows you to up-sell to satisfied customers.

Marco: How can organizations measure customer satisfaction?

Rob: A valuable way to measure how well your marketing resonates with customers is to look at your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). This straightforward metric asks customers, “How likely is it that you would recommend [your company] to a friend or colleague?” As a result, the customers are divided into three categories: promoters, passives, and detractors. Looking at your company through these groups can provide great insights on how to improve your marketing strategy.

Marco: Can organizations use satisfaction indicators like the NPS to improve the bottom line and increase profit?

Rob: The NPS goes beyond the traditional Customer Satisfaction Index because it looks at your entire customer database and not just a pre-selected group. However, the difficulty lies in tying voice of the customer metrics like satisfaction and NPS to actual business outcomes. Across the entire customer lifecycle, consumers are interacting across channels and making decisions based on those interactions. Organizations need to engage customers whenever and wherever they interact and understand the optimal times, channels and offers based on past experiences and profiles. Many organizations, including T-Mobile, are beginning to leverage advanced analytics solutions to see the influence of customer service interactions, marketing campaigns, feedback outcomes and more on buying behavior, engagement (think social media) and profitability through loyalty.

Marco: When you served as the CIO of T-Mobile, they had a very positive reputation in the mobile industry for their customer-centric approach. Can you share your experiences there?

Rob: T-Mobile is one company known for its customer-centric behavior. They gained a solid reputation in the mobile industry by looking deep into the behaviors of customers and learning from their positive or negative experiences. They leverage experience analytics software, developed by ClickFox, to gain a clear picture of its customer interactions. Those insights were used to steer customers to the most appropriate services for their needs.

Marco: What advice do you have for organizations to improve customer experiences?

Rob: CMOs and their C-suite colleagues must collaborate to adapt their organizations to the way customers behave now and redefine the traditional marketing organization. Now, more than ever, how customers enter into the ecosystem matters to both revenue and costs. Moving forward, the companies that will survive are those who react quickly and directly to customer experiences and constantly adapt their marketing to meet customers’ needs. Keeping a clear and consistent marketing message across all channels is crucial to customer satisfaction. Consumers are making decisions based on every interaction, so marketers need to engage customers at every touch point to deliver the right offer in the right channel at the right time.

Robert A. "Rob" Strickland is currently Director and President of Strickland Consulting LLC, which advises companies on how to improve efficiency, cut costs and drive revenue from a CIO perspective.

Rob serves on the advisory board of ClickFox.

Watch a playlist of videos of Rob discussing several other Customer Experience topics below:

ClickFox Joins CXPA as a Corporate Member

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

As a reflection of its recognition of the importance of customer experience management, ClickFox has joined the CXPA as a Corporate Member of the growing association.

The CXPA supports the professional development of its members and advances the field by providing research and education, establishing standards, offering networking and career opportunities, promoting the industry, and creating a better understanding of the customer experience discipline.

“ClickFox has been a pioneer in the field of customer experience by recognizing the critical importance of focusing on the complete journeys of consumers across a growing multitude of interaction channels,” said Marco Pacelli, CEO of ClickFox. “Analyzing customer behavior for over 400 million consumer accounts nationwide across retail stores, web sites, contact centers, email, chat, mobile applications and social media has given us powerful insight into the most critical issues impacting satisfaction, retention and profitability in today's enterprise. The CXPA will provide us with the opportunity to be part of a unified, informed, and collective voice to help guide the evolution of customer experience.”

ClickFox will be attending the CXPA Members Insight Exchange which is the association’s first members meeting this week. Members will join together to learn from and share their knowledge and experiences with other customer experience professionals who are equally passionate about the industry. The exchange will focus on educational sessions and networking with peers and industry leaders in the customer experience field.

Governed by a Board of Directors drawn from its membership, the CXPA is led by Bruce Temkin, co-founder and chair, and Jeanne Bliss, co-founder and vice chair – pioneers in the customer experience field who have a deep understanding of the roots of this burgeoning industry and a keen shared vision of its future.

“We greatly appreciate the commitment that ClickFox is making to the Customer Experience Professionals Association as demonstrated by being a Corporate Member,” said Temkin. “We are pleased to welcome ClickFox to the CXPA, and look forward to closely working together to help create a vibrant future for customer experience management.”

Watch a replay of a webinar with Bruce Temkin here:

The VoC Hoax (follow up post)

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

It's been a few months since our previous post about voice of the customer programs being inadequate indicators of customer experience in general and customer satisfaction in particular. Recently we came up with some additional data about this topic that we thought would be important to share with our readers.

During a recent analysis for one of our large customers who is adamant on using VoC programs to gauge customer satisfaction we found some amazing findings. The first thing we noticed was that their post-call surveys were getting a paltry 1/4% completion rate. Yes, you read that right: one quarter of one percent of customers presented with the survey actually completed it out of millions of monthly calls. How is that a significant representation of the entire customer base? How much money has been spent trying to gather this utterly useless information?

Even though this was not part of our engagement we decided to step in and take charge of the situation. We took the survey data and we did two things with it:

We looked at the entire experience leading to the survey. Not just the last touch, which is what VoC programs usually measure, but rather every interaction across all touchpoints that led to this final event. Even though the survey questions were geared toward the agent-to-customer interaction, we wanted to see if there were any upstream events that lead to this interaction in the first place and we found a lot of breakdowns in the complete experience. The agents in the call center were not to blame for the poor satisfaction scores because they had been fully optimized. They knew the scripts and products and could answer any question. But the interactions leading to the agent experience were usually the culprit.
We took the experience journeys of the few customers who did respond to the survey and matched them with the entire customer base of tens of millions of other customers. And guess what we found? There were a lot more customers with the same kinds of experiences who did not fill out surveys. But they were heading down the same path as some of the unsatisfied customers who did fill out the surveys. We even went a step further and analyzed historical data to see how many of these customers had churned and found that many of them did.

Presenting these findings to our customer got us the attention of senior executives. For a company that is focused on customer experience, they were completely blinded by the VoC hoax. The promise of being able to better understand customers by bombarding them with feedback buttons, emails and post call surveys was not showing them the true picture. Our findings caused some internal friction because all the money spent on these technologies and efforts in the past had not generated valuable results. But everyone quickly understood that the only way to truly gain value from VoC programs was to look at all the data from all interactions. And the industry is starting to understand this as well. Just look at the M&A activity around EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management) in the past few months (which isn't really going to solve the problem).

How are you using VoC to understand the complete customer experience? We'd love to hear about it in the comments.

ClickFox and Teradata Announce Partnership

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

ClickFox, the defining leader in a new breed of experience analytics, today announced a technology partnership with Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC), the world’s leading analytic data solutions company focused on Integrated Data Warehousing, Big Data Analytics, and Business Applications. The complementary technologies of ClickFox customer experience analytics and Teradata analytic data solutions will enable more users across the enterprise to benefit from near real-time intelligent data and sophisticated insights.

The partnership will focus on the expansion of both traditional customer data from call centers and interactive voice response (IVR) systems and new data sources like social media, mobile applications, and e-commerce; areas that have become critical to understanding consumer behavior and perceptions. ClickFox’s unique ability to leverage data from any source, structured or unstructured, for customer interactions across channels to existing BI and analytics application insights, offers businesses a powerful enterprise-wide view of critical trends, correlations and outcomes.

Marco Pacelli, chief executive officer of ClickFox, stated, “Teradata recognizes the tremendous value of providing cross-channel customer and product experience analysis of data to its customers. Now Teradata customers will gain an even greater competitive edge with our next-generation analytics platform that will allow them to improve loyalty, raise revenue, cut costs, enhance reputation, drive business strategy and predict future needs – all with breakthrough speed and scalability.”

ClickFox will be a sponsor at the 2011 Teradata PARTNERS User Group Conference & Expo, in San Diego, CA from October 2-6. Stop by Booth 231 in the Expo Hall to learn more about the power behind ClickFox and Teradata’s advanced data analytics solutions.

Do you use mobile apps? Answer our survey for a chance to win an iPad2!

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Mobile applications are slowly taking over our lives. To understand how consumers are using apps for customer service, we'd like you to participate in a survey that we're conducting. We're trying to understand usage, preferences and perceptions of mobile applications for customer service and engagement.

Take our 2-minute survey and we'll enter you in a drawing for a chance to win an iPad 2! We're going to give away an additional iPad2 for every 500 respondents so please share this survey with everyone you think would be interested. Click the logos to share on Facebook and Twitter:

As a survey participant, you’ll also receive a preview of the survey findings before they are published. Our previous surveys have had very interesting results about customer tipping points, interaction preferences, social CRM and more.

CEO’s Article on Business Insider: “What is Customer Satisfaction—Really?”

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

ClickFox CEO, Marco Pacelli, has a new column over at Business Insider. We’ll be sure to cross-post his articles here as well. Enjoy!

“What is Customer Satisfaction—Really?”

High customer satisfaction translates to customer loyalty, and loyalty is one of the biggest drivers of corporate growth. Let’s face it – customer satisfaction is at an all-time low in our country. So, what exactly is going on?

For one thing, in responding to customers’ needs, companies often rely too heavily on their customer surveys in which only a small percentage of consumers participate. In addition, even high CSAT scores do not necessarily translate directly into customer loyalty and profitability. Despite these facts, over three fourths of customer service organizations rely exclusively on CSAT scores to understand their customers’ experiences, according to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. Certainly, surveys can offer valuable information, but they’re only a tiny piece of the overall puzzle. Customer expectations of in-store, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and online systems that deliver services and products are very high, and we all know where ignoring the bigger picture leads.

As we’ve seen, when a company fails to meet customers’ expectations, they take action. Consumers cancel cable services, they switch cell phone providers, they change banks, and they refuse to book a flight on the airlines that lost their luggage. They also share their experiences and not through surveys. Instead, they tweet, they chat, they blog, they assign ratings, and they make recommendations and give warnings. In short, many more customers are sharing their opinions and their preferences with their virtual next door neighbors—thousands of like-minded friends—in real time. Word-of-mouth has assumed an additional dimension. The more humorous and the bigger the rants, the more people are likely to read, watch and listen.

To understand customers—what customers are doing and what they’re saying—companies need to examine the customers’ interactions with their products and services through a different lens and discover where these are falling short. Fortunately, the “know your customer” adage has been taken to an entirely new level by experience analytics platform providers. In fact, Forrester has said that an experience platform ClickFox offers provides the unique capability to “identify discrepancies between system design and actual interactions across multiple channels to provide meaningful insight.” Tracking actual customer behaviors and experiences across retail, online and contact centers provides powerful insights into the root cause of issues like poor satisfaction. Fast growing, successful companies retain and gain customer loyalty by doing more than simply resolving an existing problem. They avert common downstream issues by being proactive.

To be proactive, companies must gain insights into their customers that reach far beyond survey data. Here, a comprehensive view of the customer experience from beginning to end with the opportunity to drill down to understand specific interactions becomes extremely valuable. By identifying repeated patterns, complaints and areas for improvement, companies can focus on and remove the greatest obstacles to the consumer, reduce repeat calls over the same issue, and avert future problems. Companies have the opportunity to understand customer behavior and improve satisfaction rates. This leads to greater customer retention and company growth so that companies can rely on the strongest marketing engine that exists: the customer.

CEO’s Article on Business Insider: Which Operating Systems for Smartphones are Generating Higher Service Costs?

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0500

ClickFox CEO, Marco Pacelli, has a new column over at Business Insider. We’ll be sure to cross-post his articles here as well. Enjoy!

Which Operating Systems for Smartphones are Generating Higher Service Costs?

The explosion of smartphones has revolutionized the wireless world in recent years, serving as an additional revenue stream for telecom companies, while offering consumers dramatically advanced user experiences and convenience. Smartphone data plans increase monthly service bills by $10-$20 per customer, improving the bottom line for wireless companies by billions annually. However, technological advances like these often mean an increased demand for customer support and service for consumer adoption and maintenance.

Data from 250 million wireless customers in the U.S. shows that smartphone customers using specific operating systems are costing providers more to service. In our recently released CEAi Industry Brief, we found that Apple’s iOS operating system had the lowest cost-to-serve, with BlackBerry coming in second and Android third. In fact, in a normalized comparison we found that across the four major U.S. wireless providers, it costs an additional $56 million annually to serve BlackBerry users and $93 million more annually for Android users when compared to Apple. And that’s just based on the increase in requests for live agent transfers!

When we looked at repeat call and transfer rates, we found the same scenario. In the top range were Android users, followed by BlackBerry and finally Apple. In fact, Android and BlackBerry users were five percent more likely to call back or be transferred more than once during a 24 hour period after their initial contact.

Some of the discussions around these figures have pointed out that Apple incurs some of the cost through their own call centers and stores, where customers meet with experts at the Genius Bar to resolve their issues. And while this impacts the carriers’ service cost for repeat calls and transfers, it’s more of a brand identity issue. Android users are not going to call Google for help when they can’t connect to their Gmail account and BlackBerry users won’t call RIM to find out why their email hasn’t been synching for the past three days. These users will call their wireless providers.

So what can carriers do to reduce these costs? They can start by doing a better job of educating their customers before they let them walk out of the store. They can provide better online support and tutorials to make sure most of the easier issues can be resolved by self-service channels. And they can put some of the pressure back on the operating system developers to deliver a better product that generates less support requests. With more than 100 million smartphones sold globally in the second quarter of 2011, the cost of servicing these customers is only increasing.

To find out more, check out our “Does It Pay To Be Smart?” infographic or download the CEAi Industry Brief.

BEYOND BI: The Pursuit of High Performance Analytics [Webinar Replay]

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0500

ClickFox CEO, Marco Pacelli, recently participated in an online webinar hosted by our partners at EMC/Greenplum:

Massive volumes of information – commonly referred to as Big Data – are growing beyond the performance capacity of traditional data warehouses and database management systems. New technologies like analytic databases, open source software, noSQL and Hadoop are enabling businesses to process massive amounts of data that had previously been untapped and wasted.

The bottom line is that BI has to evolve and give way to high performance analytics.

During this webcast you will discover:

The BI market is evolving and creating new opportunities for organizations to leverage Big Data
New database technologies enable cost-effective analytic solutions that weren’t previously possible
Data can best turned into a source of competitive advantage
How ClickFox replaced Oracle with the EMC Greenplum DB to achieve high-performance analytics

Featuring:
Merv Adrian – Research VP, Gartner

Presented by:
Marco Pacelli – CEO, ClickFox
Matt Neglay – Principal Solutions Architect, EMC Greenplum

Moderated by:
Michael Maxey– Director of Product Marketing, EMC Greenplum

You can now watch the webinar recording here.

CEO’s Article on Business Insider: Is Social Media Just Another Customer Service Interaction Silo?

Thu, 18 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0500

ClickFox CEO, Marco Pacelli, has a new column over at Business Insider. We’ll be sure to cross-post his articles here as well. Enjoy!

Is Social Media Just Another Customer Service Interaction Silo?

Social media is all the rage lately with new solutions, companies and “gurus” popping up everywhere. There’s no denying that social media has revolutionized the way companies listen to and engage with their customers, but there is also no consensus about its true impact and ROI. Many have claimed social media will eventually boil down to just another method for marketers to shove their agenda down consumers’ throats. Some say it’s the only way companies will do business in the future. So where’s the truth? Well, somewhere in the middle, of course.

We need to remember that social media is still in its infancy and part of the problem is understanding what the real value is. At ClickFox, we recently set out to survey consumers' preferences and understand their desire to use social media for customer service purposes. Several industries have embraced this medium and have enjoyed much success and accolades, while others have struggled due to low customer adoption rates, strict regulations and overall confusion. We found that 76 percent of respondents would use social media for customer service purposes if they better understood the tools at their disposal.

The social media landscape is extremely fractured right now, which creates an overwhelming number of ways to interact with customers. You can set up accounts on several platforms and use social monitoring and engagement tools to keep track of all these interactions. You can go a step further and use Social CRM tools to try to connect these customers back to your massive databases. But is it enough?

Customers don’t use social channels exclusively to interact with your company. You’ve spent millions over the past few decades to make sure they can call you, visit your retail locations, go to your websites, email, chat, use self-service kiosks or various other interaction methods. So the question now becomes: Do you really know what these customers have done outside of the social media silo you’ve just created for them?

You might think that social media channels are inexpensive to maintain. Just throw a few bodies at it and they can handle all those pesky tweets and forum posts, right? The reality is that 40 percent of customers who fail to resolve their issue through social media channels will pick up their phone and try to reach a live agent. That “free” social media interaction just became an extremely costly one with an average cost of $15 per interaction, based on what industry you’re in. Email (17 percent at $3 per interaction) and online chat (16 percent at $5 per interaction) round out the top three spots in our survey. Not so cheap anymore, is it?

Customers are not only willing to use social media for customer service issues—they’re coming to expect it as an option. When you respond immediately to customer service requests via social media channels, you provide a positive customer experience upfront. This will prevent customers from exploring other more costly channels to resolve their issues. It’s important to build your social media infrastructures to properly engage with and serve your customer base. The key to achieving seamless and cost‐effective service is to monitor customers as they move from social media to other channels—such as your website or call center—so that issues can be easily identified and quickly resolved.

Remember: Your customers can be your best sales team or your harshest critics.

To find out more, check out our social media as a customer service infographic or download the survey results.

How much does it cost wireless providers to service different smartphone operating systems? [Infographic]

Fri, 12 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0500

In our latest CEAi industry market brief, we decided to tackle an interesting, but often neglected, aspect of the booming smartphone mobile market: Service Costs.

The explosion of smartphones has revolutionized the wireless world in recent years, serving as an invaluable additional revenue stream for telecom companies while offering consumers dramatically advanced user experiences and convenience. Smartphone data plans increase monthly service bills by $10-$20 per customer, improving the bottom line for wireless companies by billions annually. However, technological advances like these often mean an increased demand for customer support and service for consumers adoption and maintenance.

How many times have you found yourself stuck trying to use an app for your BlackBerry? Or found that the location-based restaurant app doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to? Or worst of all, your corporate e-mail is not coming through to your smartphone the way it’s supposed to?

Well, it turns out that questions like these increase the number of customer service calls to wireless carriers, increasing servicing costs. If we look closely at smartphones by operating system, there are clear differences. Analysis of more than 250 million wireless subscribers in the U.S. revealed interesting data points around the cost of servicing smartphone users:

E Source Announces Top Electric and Gas Company IVRs

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0500

E Source, a provider of independent research, advisory, and information services to utilities, major energy users, and other key players in the retail energy marketplace, recently released its 2011 Review of North American Electric and Gas Company IVRs and 3 of the top 7 ranked utilities are leveraging ClickFox customer experience analytics to optimize IVR effectiveness and increase self-service success. One top-ranked provider increased IVR containment from 30% to 70% with insights delivered by ClickFox.

ClickFox currently analyzes customer behavior for over 20 million utility consumers nationwide across channels like web, IVR, and live agent, delivering powerful insights into the most critical trends and issues impacting the customer experience - watch a video about ClickFox’s utility expertise and footprint and learn about the challenges and opportunities within the utility industry that analytics is addressing.

Carl Lyon of The QoE Joins ClickFox for Customer Experience Roundtable Discussion

Mon, 18 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0500

This week, Carl Lyon, Discussion Chairman for The QoE (Quality of Experience), a forum designed to foster collaboration and best practice-sharing within the customer experience industry, met with ClickFox experts in Denver to exchange insights on customer experience trends, measurement and business impact in the modern age. The QoE brings together senior executives from large organizations to explore the issues and address the challenges involved in delivering exceptional customer and employee experience and works to develop a framework for driving customer-centric improvement and change. ClickFox currently analyzes customer behavior trends for over 400 million consumer accounts, providing deep insight into the most critical issues impacting the customer experience across service channels including retail stores, web sites, self-service applications, contact centers, mobile applications, social media and more.

Carl shared his vision and expertise around the subject, highlighting the importance of customer perception, employee engagement, company culture and internal change in improving the end-to-end customer journey, while ClickFox discussed how its clients are leveraging experience analytics to drive dramatic business value and quantifiable results. Carl also presented concepts around the role of social media and the ROI associated with customer experience initiatives in today’s enterprise. The exchange of knowledge and ideas will be invaluable to the development of customer experience and help both parties address current and future challenges. Stay tuned for a video of Carl discussing the changing customer experience landscape, customer-centric culture and the bottom-line benefits of an improved customer experience.

For information on becoming a member of the QoE, please visit www.theqoe.com.

Social Media as an Emerging Customer Service Channel [Survey Results]

Thu, 14 Jul 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Fast Company has just released our latest infographic (below) on the topic of Social Media and its impact on businesses as a customer service channel. Consumers are increasingly using social media channels to talk about the companies they do business with, but they are also directly interacting with businesses and fellow consumers through online communities, like forums and blogs, to access information, service and support. The Social Media survey sought to discover:

Can your business avoid unnecessary customer service costs?
How can word of mouth impact your business?
Are consumers confused about their options?
What adoption rates are industries seeing for Social Media as a service channel?

CEO’s Article on Business Insider: What Makes Your Blood Boil?

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 00:00:00 -0500

ClickFox CEO, Marco Pacelli, has a new column over at Business Insider. We’ll be sure to cross-post his articles here as well. Enjoy!

Has a customer service experience ever made you want to scream? You’re not alone. As consumers, we have high expectations for the companies we invest our money in. And when they fail on service, send us through migraine-inducing communications loops and waste our time, we’re frustrated and disappointed and we want to take action.

Technology has made it easier than ever to yell it loud from the digital mountaintops – to vent our complaints with friends, post our experience on Twitter or defame a brand on its own Facebook page. With the bullhorn of social networks, one bad experience can make a big impact. Just ask United Airlines about how they handle guitars.

Poor customer service is a lose-lose situation. Not only does it hurt consumers, but companies who cross the line get buried in an avalanche of negative opinions, and that brand hit can take years to recover. Beyond that, there are so many lost opportunities for companies who are fine, or even good, at customer service, to be great. They need to understand the impact of customer behavior and interactions on critical business drivers like attrition, profitability and loyalty.

We carry those stories with us, and we share them with others, like this consumer who told us: “The customer service was so bad and the charges were so outrageous that I cancelled my contract and from this day still tell people about it. This happened seven years ago. That is how much I can’t stand them.”

It’s time for companies to take a much harder look at how they’re handling customer interactions and customer service, and figure out how to not only keep customers from wanting to paint-bomb their headquarters, but actually get their customers to love them. At ClickFox, we recently conducted an online survey to ask consumers what customer service issues frustrate them most. That showed that the top three issues are:

Having to speak with multiple agents and starting over every time (41 percent of respondents)
Rude and inexperienced representatives or service technicians (13 percent of respondents)
Being kept on hold for long periods of time (9.3 percent of respondents)

The remaining 36.7 percent of consumers noted frustration in not getting what they need on the first try, not being understood by speech recognition applications, surprise fee/price increases, frequent service interruptions or disruptions, difficulty logging in or navigating a website and long windows of time waiting for a service representative.

These frustrations not only impact our mood and general opinion of the brand, they also have a profound impact on the company and its bottom line. Our survey also asked consumers how they react to a negative customer service experience, and the most common reactions were to: ask for a manager (54.4 percent), tell a friend/family member/peer (51.8 percent), cease any business with the company (39.7 percent), submit a negative customer satisfaction survey (24.4 percent), post comments on social networking sites or consumer review sites (20.6 percent), and/or write a letter of complaint (18.1 percent). Organizations are directly impacted by these reactions as they face increased operations costs, lost revenue and severe brand damage.

There is a high correlation between customer service and customer loyalty. Granted, a customer’s propensity to leave a company may vary based on the complexity and effort involved to switch to a competitor; however, it can be very telling in industries like telecom and banking where a customer would rather take the hit of a cancelation fee or penalty than remain a customer. One consumer told us, “I left while my contract was still in effect and paid the fee to move to a different carrier.”

While most organizations know when they aren’t doing a great job of servicing customers, and are even working to make improvements, almost none are actually analyzing the direct impact of customer interactions and service experiences on actual business outcomes. They understand that they need to address low customer satisfaction scores, but they typically don’t have insight into what events and behaviors drive dissatisfaction. They need to take a holistic view of their customers as individuals, not split personalities as seen through the silos of different data centers, depending on whether the interaction was online or over the phone.

The technology is available today to bring it all together and do this right. Companies who care – and companies who are smart about growth – will figure out how to better understand their customers and transform that customer hate into love and reach the best goal of all: the long term happy relationship.