ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

The report, which describes ClickFox as the “most prominent” vendor in the contact center market, notes that consumer behavior is changing with the emergence of newer service channels like web and mobile: “The rapid uptake of web-based collaboration tools such as social media make understanding customer behavior across all channels a crucial part of the effort to provide stellar customer experiences.” Ovum analyst, Aphrodite Brinsmead, also notes that “A greater number of customer touchpoints has created pressure for enterprises to create consistent experiences across multiple channels. In order to increase satisfaction rates and improve first contact resolution, enterprises must provide relevant information at the initial point of contact. Cross-channel analytics are increasingly important to understand customer preferences and adapt services appropriately.”

Brinsmead points to the limitations of surveys and other analytics tools in delivering complete insight into customer experience: “Although there are a number of ways to measure customer satisfaction, including surveys and speech analytics, these tools do not relate different channel interactions from the same customer.” The report notes that “[ClickFox] aggregates data from all possible points of contact between a customer and an organization” to track consumer patterns and predict future behavior. This insight enables organizations to deliver more cost-effective, satisfying experiences tailored to their customer’s unique needs, regardless of the channel used.

For a limited time, you can download the report here.

You can also download a Forrester Research about Real-Time Analytics for Contact Centers which singles out ClickFox’s unique capabilities (available for a limited time as well).

Click here to register for our upcoming webinar with Forrester’s Vice President and Principal Analyst which takes place this Thursday, the 10th of June at 1pm EST.

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

CRM Magazine today released their choices for The 2010 CRM Service Awards and ClickFox has been recognized with the Rising Star Award. The editors of CRM Magazine explain that the CRM Service Awards are designed to remind us that technology plays a critical role in the customer experience. Even in those rare moments when we do have choice, we’d better also have the benefit of information, lest we squander it. That probably makes information one of the cornerstones of service, as well. Describing the Rising Star Awards, they say:

In their short lives they’ve been able to empower and enable the delivery of high-quality service to their clients’ customers.

What’s more, this year’s winners have accomplished that feat during a period of economic recession, a trying set of circumstances that have hamstrung companies 10 times their size and resulted in lasting repercussions not only with startups but with their current and prospective clients as well.

In the article about ClickFox, Keith Dawson of Frost & Sullivan is quoted:

“I was impressed when ClickFox took apart its application and tuned it to specific applications aimed at specific business processes,” says Keith Dawson, principal analyst for information and communication technologies at Frost & Sullivan. “When you do that in a space that has had trouble getting traction—like analytics—it’s a sign that there’s a realization you need to actually produce the goods and not just talk about them.”

To read the complete article click here.

Join us for our next webinar featuring Forrester analyst, Bruce Temkin, titled “Understand your Customers as Individuals, Not Individual Transactions”.

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.

We’ve added a few links on the right hand side of the blog and wanted to point them out to our readers. They are in alphabetical order and here’s a short description of each one:

Customer Experience Matrix – Written by David Raab, a consultant specializing in marketing technology and analysis, this blog presents information about technologies and business issues that help your organization make the most of every customer interaction.

Customer Experience Matters – Written by Bruce Temkin, Vice President & Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, this blog focuses on customer experience and is Bruce’s personal blog and not associated with his employer, although it does reference much of his research.

Customers Rock! – Written by Becky Carroll, long-time customer advocate and someone who is passionate about social media, marketing, and the customer experience, this blog focuses on customers, their experiences, and how businesses can make sure their customer experiences rock!

CustomerThink – Written by several contributing authors, CustomerThink is a global online community of business leaders striving to create profitable customer-centric enterprises. Their main areas of coverage are Customer Relationship Management, Customer Experience Management and Social Business.

These are just a few of the many blogs that focus on the customer experience. Would you like to be included in our blogroll? Do you know of another terrific blog that we should be aware of? Please let us know in the comments.

And in case you missed it, you should view the replay of our webinar with Bruce Temkin: Finding Your Competitive Advantage Using Customer Experience Analytics.

We had a great time at SpeechTEK this year! While some of the exhibitors were milling about, we had a lot of traffic at our booth and people were 3-4 deep trying to get a glimpse of the live demos we were running around the clock.

There was definitely a buzz about ClickFox’s ability to deliver cross-channel customer experience analytics and it seemed like everyone wanted to know more. Here’s a quick video of what the booth looked like. You can see Jeff James, Senior Director of Sales Engineering, engage the crowd in a discussion about the capabilities of CEA5:

ClickFox CMO, Anna Convery, sat on the panel “Using Analytics to Drive Value” with several other industry experts. While many companies have been quick to jump on the “analytics” bandwagon, many of the solutions offered today are technology specific and do not offer an easy way to combine multiple silos of information intelligently. Convery was there to try to help clear the air and set the right expectation for organizations looking to understand the complete customer experience, across all enterprise interaction touch-points.

We met many familiar faces as well as several new ones. We wanted to thank everyone who came by the booth, or met with us in person at other venues. We’d like to give a quick “shout out” to some of these people (in no particular order):

• Sheri Greenhous – Managing Partner, CRMXchange (on twitter @sgreenhaus)
• Adele Sage – Analyst, Forrester Research (on twitter @adelesage)
• Aphrodite Brinsmead – Associate Analyst, Datamonitor (on twitter @diteb)
• Judith Markovitz – President, J. Markovitz Consultants
• Ginger Conlon – Editor-in-Chief, 1to1 media (on twitter @gingerconlon)
• Nancy Jamison – Jamison Consulting (on twitter @NancyJami)
• Keith Dawson – Principal Analyst, Frost & Sullivan
• Erin Harrison – Senior Editor, TMCnet
• Bill Meisel – President, TMA Associates
• Daniel Hong – Customer Interaction Technologies Analyst, Datamonitor (on twitter @D_Hong)

We’re sorry if we left anyone out of the list, we literally met hundreds of people at the show this year. Looking forward to 2010!

BTW, the demo that Jeff is showing in the video above is now available for viewing on our website after registration. So if you’re interested in seeing what all the excitement is about, click here.

We recently announced another event in the ClickFox Webinar Series. Here are the details:

Today’s customers have a variety of preferences and expectations that make managing customer experience data complex. The comprehensive customer experience is defined by the collective interactions they have with the enterprise, and the ability to analyze these interactions enables a company to proactively provide an optimal experience at every touch point.

Register today!

Join ClickFox and featured guest Adele Sage of Forrester Research for a complimentary webinar:

Delivering an Integrated Customer Experience:
Best Practices in Cross-Channel Design & Analysis

ClickFox will also preview three new solution offerings — CEA Service Optimization , CEA Customer Retention and CEA Customer Modeling — each addressing strategic organizational goals.

Speakers:
Marco Pacelli, CEO of ClickFox, and Anna Convery, CMO of ClickFox, will overview ClickFox CEA (Customer Experience Analytics), a unique software solution that models information from all customer interactions across the enterprise — Contact Center, IVR, call routing, website, chat, retail/POS, mobile devices, email, and more. CEA provides insights and recommendations that enable a company to successfully balances two mission critical goals: providing customers with productive, satisfying experiences, and leveraging cost effective customer service options.

Featured Guest:
Adele Sage, Analyst with Forrester Research will discuss Best Practices in Cross-Channel Design, delving into why customers become dissatisfied as they navigate across channels, and why lack of consistency, continuity and insight into cross channel experience is impacting customer experience. Adele will share the current state of cross-channel analysis and experience, best practices in cross-channel design, and how companies can use this opportunity to differentiate themselves with a seamless, integrated cross-channel experience.

When:
April 30, 2009 – 2:00pm-3:00pm EST

Who Should Attend:
CIOs, CMOs, VPs and Directors of Customer Care, Customer Service, Customer Experience, Claims

Register today!

I came across an interesting article titled “Overheard – The IT department decides what data you get to see?” that raises a lot of very valuable points about the shortcomings of current BI tools. One of the things that jumps at you right away is a quote from Forrester Principal Analyst, Boris Evelson, who is quoted (from a different article):

“One bank CIO recently told me ‘We had the data, but we did not have the information,’” said Evelson, shaking his head.

This is something we hear from our customers on a regular basis. Coupled with the fact that a recent Forrester survey shows that over 40% of enterprise IT decision makers use three to five BI solutions (more than 20% of CIOs surveyed said they run six or more BI tools!) and you start to understand where the confusion comes from. How is it even possible to know what to look for in that jungle of data and tools?

One of the differentiators of the ClickFox CEA solution from standard BI tools is that it doesn’t require you to come up with a question to ask. ClickFox CEA will analyze your data, visualize your customers’ experiences in and across any interaction touch-points you may offer and automatically generate a default report (we call traffic viewer) to show you where everyone is going and what they’re doing. We also automatically generate dominant paths that show you customer preferences and behavior patterns. Armed with this knowledge you can then dive deeper into certain behaviors and analyze specific customer pain points.

Another differentiator is that unlike traditional BI tools that show you a lot of “how much of something  happened”, ClickFox shows you what happened and why. Rather than going through multiple tables of endless data and trying to extract information from them, we lay out customer behavior in a way that lets you easily understand where things went wrong and what you might want to do to fix the problems.

And one last point to touch on, which is a pretty big issue when dealing with multiple data sources – ClickFox CEA can ingest data from any system in any format, so you’re not stuck in the old-world of silo analytics any longer. This way, instead of analyzing data with multiple BI tools for several different business silos, you can combine all the information in ClickFox CEA and see the complete customer experience, from beginning to end. You can also see cross-channel behavior patterns and trend customer behavior over time. So when a customer goes to your retail location, then checks your website, then calls your speech IVR and eventually gets routed through a CTI server to a live agent – you see the entire interaction in one place (if you kept count, that’s 5 interaction touch-points). Ask yourself the following question: Can your existing BI tools easily give you this kind of visibility?

To read more about the ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics process, click this link and download our technical white paper.

And if you have any comments (agree / disagree) or questions, we’d love to hear from you too.

A few days ago Gartner issued a press release where they discussed recent analyst feedback stating that BPM (business process management) solutions have helped companies reduce costs by as much as 20% in the first year of use. The article says:

As companies try to find cost optimization opportunities during the economic downturn, business process management (BPM) investments can provide a cost savings of as much as 20 percent within the first year of implementation, according to Gartner, Inc. Analysts have said enterprises can achieve the payback from their BPM implementation within a year.

Gartner defines BPM as “a discipline that optimizes the performance of end-to-end business processes (interdepartmental functions, partners, suppliers and service providers)” and recommends that companies use it wisely. While we agree with this definition, ClickFox sees Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) as a mirror image of BPM from the customer experience perspective. Where BPM is mostly used to streamline internal processes and to confront business challenges and complex business relationships, CEA can help a company visualize and understand the complex interactions it has with its customers.

At a recent Gartner event in London, an estimated 70% of attendees were from companies who are in “survival” mode and only 20% said they were using BPM as a catalyst to grow their business. ClickFox CEA is currently being used to generate a competitive advantage for our customers, especially in the current economy where customer retention and brand loyalty are driven by the overall customer experience.

Additional information:

Click the following link to view a replay of a recent ClickFox webinar featuring Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research titled: “Finding Your Competitive Advantage Using Customer Experience Analytics“:

Click the following link to view a replay of a recent ClickFox webinar featuring Elizabeth Herrell of Forrester Research titled: “ClickFox and Forrester Research define Customer Experience Analytics” where we discussed how to reduce service cost while improving customer experience:

I just couldn’t resist the pun in the title of this post. As some of you may have already read in other places, Datamonitor associate analyst Aphrodite Brinsmead has published an article about Twitter and Google as customer service tools in which she says:

The current business environment consists of a struggling economy, in which customer acquisition is challenging, while consumers are increasingly sharing information on the web. These trends have created an opportunity for contact centers to utilize social networking websites to improve customer service at a low cost, by integrating Web 2.0 technologies with other communication technologies.

Customer experience analysis vendors, such as ClickFox, SAS and SPSS, should find ways to use the information from social networking to help enterprises understand and analyze data from customers.

While Twitter and other social networking application are in various stages of adoption and are not yet fully mature as customer service channels, many companies are starting to adopt these and other Web 2.0 technologies to interact with their customers. The main obstacle of using such tools is information security. Brinsmead says:

Some of the key concerns with integrating Web 2.0 channels into customer service solutions include the security in providing information over the web, the authenticity of postings and advisors, and data ownership. For example, banks using Twitter must be careful to educate customers about the hazards of posting personal details. Twitter is an open community, allowing anyone to find users and share information, but this can be seen as a disadvantage because there are no controls over who accesses information and the website could, in theory, be used to negatively target competitors’ brands.

ClickFox is ready to meet these challenges today. Our CEA solution is data agnostic and system independent and as companies start adopting these new ways to interact with their customers, ClickFox can incorporate these new channels into the overall cross-channel customer experience environment.

We’re not sure where social networking will end up or how it will eventually be used, but new companies like Yammer (the business Twitter), Flock (social web browser) and even the mighty Facebook (who recently launched their single sign-on API called Facebook Connect) are all getting in position to make significant changes in the ways groups and individual consumers interact with companies. And we can help these companies make sense of it all by tying these new interaction channels to the more traditional ones they are already using.

To see how ClickFox is helping customers analyze customer experience today, please visit our download library.

To read more on this topic:

1. Twitter and Google As Customer Service Tools
2. Datamonitor Argues Virtues of Web 2.0 Technologies in Contact Centers