ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

Bob Thompson, founder and CEO of CustomerThink, recently interviewed the VP of Customer Experience at Sprint and mentioned ClickFox’s part in helping understand the complete cross-channel experience during the interview. It’s an interesting interview that touches on how large organizations are embracing customer experience at the executive level and what impact customer experience analytics has on operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and churn rates.

Interview topics include (from CustomerThink):

Role and empowerment of VP of Customer Experience position
What were the big customer experience problems uncovered?
What drives real (un-trapped) customer loyalty for Sprint customers?
How did Sprint justify the improvements needed and measure its progress?
What changes resulted in the recent improvements in ACSI scores?
What is the role of technology to identify problems?
Three critical elements for success in Customer Experience leadership

You can hear the question about ClickFox and it’s impact at around the 23 minute mark:

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Read more about how Sprint leveraged CEA to earn top industry honors (PDF).

1to1 Media’s Executive Business Editor Tom Hoffman has a video segment called ‘Hoffman’s Hot Seat’ where he sits down with today’s business leaders to discuss the latest trends in customer strategy and tactics. In this week’s hot seat he interviewed ClickFox CMO, Anna Convery, at the Gartner 360 conference in a segment titled “Best Practices for Applying Customer Experience Analytics:”

Customer-centric companies are trying to learn as much as they can from their customers’ experiences in order to more effectively meet their needs and maximize business opportunities with them. ClickFox Chief Marketing Officer Anna Convery shares her recommendations on using customer experience analytics to make the most out of each customer interaction.

Below is the interview  in its entirety (click here if you’re reading this via an email subscription):

Anna was also quoted today in a 1to1 Magazine article titled “Turning Up the Voice of the Customer” where she discussed how new unstructured sources of customer feedback can provide a deeper level of customer insight when integrated with more traditional, structured VoC data:

“Customers are different and have different ways of expressing satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a company,” says Anna Convery, chief marketing officer of analytics firm ClickFox. New interaction channels help companies understand customer activity and reach people who don’t give feedback through traditional channels.

Read the full article here.

About the Book:

Agile Development and Business Goals describes a unique, state-of-the-art methodology that aligns the critical but often “silo-ed” software development process with core company goals. Eschewing long-winded “agile philosophy” in favor of a formally prioritized process, this book serves as a distilled learning guide for managing technical resources in a manner that directly boosts your bottom line. Build the teams, define the roles, acquire the tools, and deliver your world-class software on time and on budget.

About the Authors:

Bill Holtsnider is an experienced writer, educator, and software professional with more than 26 years of experience working in the computer industry. His IT expertise includes working in such diverse areas as stock portfolio management, identity management, and software development. He is the author of six books and a wide range of technical and marketing documentation.

Tom Wheeler has a long track record of building organizations to develop commercial software, including products for financial services and contact centers. He has built, sold and been a senior manager in a variety of different types of companies, including international conglomerates and garage-sized start ups. He first created the Six Week Solution back in the 1980′s and has been fine-tuning it since.

George Stragand is a manager and software developer with over 20 years of producing and managing the delivery of commercial software on time. He has worked for companies ranging in size from startups to multinationals, creating software both for external and in-house use. He still hasn’t found a problem which couldn’t be solved by one more level of indirection or a suitable amount of explosives in the correct location.

Joseph Gee has spent the last 10 years of his career leading and coaching teams through a variety of successful projects and Agile transitions. His advocacy for software craftsmanship has equipped teams for success in small custom shops, large telecom enterprise systems, commercial shrink-wrap modeling software, and, most recently, cutting edge behavioral analytics.

The book is now in stock at Amazon.com.

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!

On Tuesday, ClickFox’s customer, Sprint, received the prestigious Gartner & 1to1 Media Gold CRM Excellence Award for outstanding customer strategies that produce impressive business results. Below is an excerpt from 1to1 Media’s Customer Centricity Wins article titled “Sprint Nextel’s Leadership Makes Customer Experience a Top Priority.” The article goes into further detail about how the telecommunications company has improved retention and service levels while cutting costs:

Partnering with ClickFox, Sprint began to analyze cross-channel behavior trends and issues of each segment to see customers’ complete paths across all service touch-points. This helps to flag customers who require targeted support, whose contracts are about to expire, and the like.

The company integrates many of its supporting customer service solutions providers through its cross-channel analytics platform, including Merced’s performance management suite, Sprint’s internal CRM system, and Enkata’s first-contact resolution tools. Doing so provides Sprint with a centralized view of its customers, which is fed with customer satisfaction, CRM, and churn data to identify hidden connections between interactions and customer loyalty, and to help plan marketing campaigns and determine website content. Sprint can correlate customer satisfaction results with churn data to understand the direct impact of poor scores on a customer’s likelihood to leave, as well as on future buying patterns.

This cross-channel analysis has led to never-before-seen insights into customer pain points driving dissatisfaction and churn. For example, Sprint uncovered an issue preventing many customers from activating new phones via self-service. Customers who were unable to successfully activate their phones transferred to live agents who weren’t empowered to handle the issue, so customers were referred to the retail store. This resulted in customer returning phones and canceling service plans.

The entire article is available here (no registration required).

Sprint was recognized today for their enterprise-wide vision and commitment to the customer experience as the Gold winner of the 2010 Gartner & 1to1 Media Customer Relationship Management Excellence Award in the Customer Experience category. These awards highlight innovative companies that impact value through their customer relationship strategy and demonstrate excellence in delivering the customer experience.

Sprint leverages ClickFox CEA to analyze customer experience behavior trends across interaction channels, including retail stores, web, call center, IVR, and CTI routing applications. This single, powerful view of the customer is tied to customer satisfaction and customer churn data to identify hidden connections between interactions and customer loyalty for dramatically improved satisfaction and retention.

Bob Johnson, Sprint’s Chief Service Officer, says:

“The award is gratifying and a reflection of Sprint’s work over the last few years to improve the quality and consistency of our customer interactions. ClickFox, one of our important partners in this process, provided us with key insight needed to drive measurable improvements in customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention.”

Marco Pacelli, ClickFox’s CEO, congratulated Sprint on this prestigious award and says:

“Sprint has demonstrated what it truly means to be customer-centric by elevating customer experience to be a strategic, enterprise-wide initiative. They are one of several progressive Fortune 500 companies leveraging cross-channel analytics, and ClickFox is proud to be a part of their commitment to revolutionizing the complete, end-to-end customer experience.”

Read the full press release here.

As customer experience becomes more strategic in today’s enterprise, ClickFox Pulse answers the demand for executives to gain direct, easy access to key customer experience metrics and insight, enabling them to keep their finger on the ‘pulse’ of their customer and their business. Pulse draws on ClickFox’s unique ability to unify the customer experience by leveraging data from all customer interaction channels, including: retail, Web, IVR, call center, email, chat and mobile/SMS applications. Powered by ClickFox’s award-winning CEA platform, ClickFox Pulse introduces new, innovative features that enable executives to gain a single view of the customer across the enterprise.

Pulse is also the first product of its kind that measures the financial impact of today’s complex customer experience on the organization. By leveraging user-defined data like cost per transaction and average lifetime value, executives can immediately identify opportunities to reduce costs and grow revenue by implementing more efficient, customer-centric business strategies and processes. Pulse can then be used to monitor and measure the upstream and downstream impact of changes over time for seamless reporting and analysis.

Marco Pacelli, ClickFox CEO, says:

“Traditionally, executives have only had access to limited, siloed views of the customer from various departments within the organization. ClickFox Pulse was specifically designed to reveal hidden connections in customer behavior across all interaction channels, eliminating these executive ‘blind spots’, and delivering a single, powerful view of the customer experience across the entire enterprise. ClickFox is the only solution on the market able to deliver this level of insight in a way that is highly intuitive and actionable, supporting a top-down approach to customer experience.”

(If you’re reading this post via an Email subscription – Click here to view a demo of ClickFox Pulse )

Read the complete press release here.

Today we announced the release of a new book being published July 7^th, Agile Development and Business Goals: The Six Week Solution. The book is authored by Bill Holtsnider, Joseph Gee, George Stragand and Tom Wheeler; four of the company’s visionary software developers behind the pioneering customer experience analytics (CEA) software and solutions. The book goes beyond theory and academia to offer a practical guide for aligning software development processes with core business goals.

Tom Wheeler, VP of Research and Development at ClickFox says about the book:

“I have applied the knowledge and best practices in this book to launch innovative, business-driven enterprise software solutions like customer experience analytics (CEA). I think developers will appreciate the fact that this book speaks their language, and does so in the context of their role in driving strategic goals for the organization.”

The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com.

We’re pleased to announce the addition of Rob Strickland, Senior Consultant to Amdocs, Ltd, to our customer advisory board. The ClickFox advisory board is comprised of progressive executives from leading, world-class organizations in financial services, telecom, utility and insurance, who share a mission to improve and optimize the complete, cross-channel customer experience.

Marco Pacelli, ClickFox CEO, says:

“ClickFox will leverage Rob’s extensive experience and innovative vision for our growing advisory board. His expertise and successful track record of applying technology to achieve strategic business results makes him a highly valuable asset for ClickFox’s continued growth and dominance in the customer experience analytics market.”

Read the full press release here.

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.