ClickFox and Merced Systems today announced a partnership delivering visibility into the customer-agent-organization relationship. This combination of comprehensive cross-channel customer behavior insight from Clickfox with the sales and service optimization solutions in Merced Performance Suite will align customer experience with agent performance and revenue optimization goals for large enterprise customers. Says, ClickFox CEO, Marco Pacelli:
“In our customer base and in the overall marketplace we are seeing increased demand to quickly and efficiently provide data not only to optimize the customer experience but also to drive more revenue from service operations. Our relationship with Merced Systems delivers on this demand by enabling organizations to align customer behavior and preferences to sales and service strategies so they capitalize on every interaction to dramatically increase loyalty and revenue.”
CustomerThink has published a post by ClickFox’s CEO, Marco Pacelli, titled “Get Past the Yes Man.”
It’s every executive’s fear: Their direct reports paint a picture of healthy, high-performance business segments. But in reality, these reports are downplaying the major issues and the executives have no reliable source to give it to ‘em straight.
Getting a complete view of how a customer interacts with a business – online, in retail sites, and through call centers – is one of those executive blind spots, mostly because the rich data that each department measures is locked in organizational and information silos.
To find out more, join us for our next webinar on March 18th at 1pm EST, featuring Forrester analyst, Bruce Temkin, titled “Understand your Customers as Individuals, Not Individual Transactions”.
1to1 Magazine today published an article titled “What’s Wrecking Your Customer Experience” where they explained four strategies companies can use to navigate their way to customer experience excellence. Anna Convery, ClickFox CMO, was one of the interviewees quoted in the article:
Anna Convery, chief marketing officer at customer experience analytics company ClickFox, says she is beginning to see more chief customer officers and the like who sponsor customer experience projects. But it’s not yet commonplace. “There is a lot of talk about the customer experience at the C-level, but not a lot of folks putting their shoulder to the wheel,” she says.
“Traditionally analytics have been pushed up from each department,” adds Convery of ClickFox. “But as you bring metrics up to the C-level, it means that the organization understands the importance of the customer experience.”
Convery also recommends a focus on metrics around customer acquisition, retention, and growth, which all have bottom-line impact. In addition to new customer volume and share of wallet numbers, however, she advises going deeper into the data:
What causes customers to churn? Look at 90-day pre-churn behavior to identify other potential churners and save them before they go.
What’s the best way to onboard a new customer? Follow good customers and create a model of their first 30-day experience to create other good customers from day one.
How does self-service impact the customer experience? Map customer experience, customer satisfaction, and loyalty metrics against self-service. Are the experience metrics the same, better, or worse if customers use self-service channels?
What are surveys really telling us? Pay close attention to user surveys not just to look at results, but to see what customers tried to do and where the experience broke down.
Ultimately, it’s what you do with the data that will decide if your company creates or avoids a customer experience pitfall. “The data may be there, but as an organization if you’re not ready to implement change, it becomes merely an academic result,” Convery says.
To read the entire 1to1 article click here (login required).
The article also quotes Forrester analyst, Bruce Temkin, who will be featured in our next webinar. To register for the webinar titled “Understand your Customers as Individuals, Not Individual Transactions” click here.
Understand your Customers as Individuals, Not Individual Transactions – Featuring Bruce Temkin
Thursday, March 18th 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.
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.
Have you had a chance to check out our new Customer Experience ROI Calculator yet? It’s a truly unique ROI tool and many people have tried it out so far with a lot of eye-opening results. I’ve decided to put together a few posts with examples of using the calculator, based on fictitious examples of large, medium and small companies. Today we’ll tackle the large company example. First, I’d like you to take a quick look at the introduction video (click here if reading through RSS or email):
We’re going to look at a company that currently has 10 million customers and is growing at an annual rate of 5%. By leaving all the defaults in place we see that this company has 300 million customer interactions per year. These interactions are through the phone channel (IVR and Agent), Web and Retail. With a 5% increase in self service rates and industry average costs of $5 for a live agent call, $.50 for self service IVR, $.05 for a web session and $20 for a retail visit – we come to almost $1B in cost savings over 5 years. But let’s break this down a little and see what happens in a few scenarios.
Scenario 1: Let’s assume that the company in question is in the healthcare industry and has a much higher live agent cost per call, say $20. We’ll also reduce the number of retail visits to zero and the number of web sessions to 5. We’re going to keep our average number of calls per customer to 8 per year and see what happens. Now the 5 year savings have increased to almost $2.2B over 5 years. But the annual growth target should be lower so we will change it to 2% and we’ll lower the current self service rate to 40%. Even with those changes we’re still looking at a little over $2B in cost savings over 5 years.
Scenario 2: Now we’re going to look at a financial institution that has a robust website and a highly effective self service IVR system. Customers call for various reasons, from ordering new checks or checking an account balance (that can both be easily accomplished in self service) to disputing a charge, which may require speaking to a live agent. I’ve increased the number of calls to 12 per year and number of web sessions to 24. I’ve also increased the self service rate to 75% but reduced the average annual improvement in self service and the annual growth rate of the company to 2%. Even with these reduced improvement levels this company would be able to realize over $1.1B in costs over 5 years.
Scenario 3: This time we’ll look at what happens to a cellular provider who only allows customers to get to an agent after an extremely elaborate IVR. Customers still get through at a very high rate of 70% and they call in 20 times per year. Since these are fairly short calls, each of the company’s live agents is able to handle 35 calls per day. We know that many of these calls can be self-served so we’ll leave the annual self-service improvement level at 5%. At these rates this company will have a slow start and will only realize a little over $400K in costs savings during the first year. But over the course of 5 years that will grow to over $1.4B in total savings.
Do you want to find out how your company can realize these kinds of savings with ClickFox’s Customer Experience Analytics solution? Check out our free Customer Experience ROI Calculator and customize it to your needs. You might also want to read our CEA White Paper to get a better understanding of how it all works.
Anna Convery, ClickFox CMO, will speak at the Technology Association of Georgia’s ‘State of CRM’ event, an annual gathering of technology leaders focused the customer relationship management (CRM) industry. More than 60 senior CRM executives will be attending the State of CRM Breakfast, which will take place Thursday, January 14, 2010, from 7:30 am to 9:00 am at Oracle Corporation, 1100 Abernathy Rd., Suite 1120, Atlanta, GA 30328). For more information, visit: www.tagonline.org.
Every January the TAG CRM Society hosts a panel to discuss the newest trends in the industry. This year, the theme is centered around Gartner’s Top 10 Strategic Technologies in 2010, five of which are relevant to the CRM industry: (1) Cloud Computing, (2) Advanced Analytics (3) IT for Green, (4) Social Computing and (5) Mobile Applications.
We published our third Industry Brief today focused on the utility industry. One of the biggest challenges utility executives face is changing the utility culture to be more flexible and customer focused as they strive to implement current trends in customer service and compete in an environment characterized by volatile market conditions regulation and de-regulation, and unexpected seasonal and event-driven peaks in volume.
ClickFox today released a free interactive Customer Experience ROI Calculator and we invite everyone to try it out. Focused mostly on operational efficiency, this real world calculator was designed based on previous engagements with leading, world-class organizations across several industries. These companies have already realized millions of dollars in cost savings by identifying ways to serve their customers more efficiently across different interaction channels.
We tried to keep it as simple as possible and all you need to do to use the ROI calculator is enter the number of customers your company serves. The tool then calculates your potential ROI using default data gathered from ClickFox’s growing repository representing billions of complex customer interactions. You can then play around with many optional parameter ranging from cost per interaction and channel-to-channel transfer rates, to specific measurements such as annual self-service containment improvement goals.
There’s also a quick instructional video to help you get started.
When you’re done, you’ll be able to download a customized ROI Report, which includes graphs showing potential operations savings over a 5-year period. The report provides details on specific areas of impact that have been identified as having the most significant and immediate effect on an organization’s bottom line. This also includes real-world examples of customers who have achieved huge returns using CEA.
“ClickFox’s calculator is extremely useful for demonstrating the tangible financial benefits of cross-channel customer experience analytics,” said Marco Pacelli, chief executive officer of ClickFox. “The calculator was built not just for customer experience decision makers, but also executives in finance, sales and marketing, product development and more, who need to understand the impact that customer experience has on their departments and the overall business.”
We announced today that we’ve grown our processing volume to over 750 million customer transactions per month, up from 500 million earlier this year. These complex cross-channel customer interactions span across multi touch-points and include Web, IVR, CTI, CSAT, Live Agents, Handheld Devices, Interactive Kiosks and others.
“No other company has gathered such a complete, collective data set that truly represents today’s varied, complex cross-channel customer,” said Marco Pacelli, chief executive officer of ClickFox. “As we continue to grow our customer base, this wealth of data deepens our domain expertise so we can identify and apply proven best practices for our Fortune 500 customers, many of whom have already realized hundred-million dollar ROIs.”
