ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

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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.

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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.

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:

Over the past month several top industry analysts have been writing about their focus for 2009. Here are a couple of examples:

Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research, who writes the excellent Customer Experience Matters blog, says his core focus is to dramatically improve the customer experiences that large organizations deliver. This encompasses three core components:

1. Insights into what drives consumers.
2. Best practices for designing good experiences.
3. Enterprise-wide programs for creating a customer-centric DNA.

You can check out his full research agenda for 2009 here.

Donna Fluss of DMG Consulting has also recently published her top ten goals for contact centers in 2009. She wrote that contact center need to help sales and marketing departments retain and increase revenue. Out of her list she points out that the top four goals are of crucial importance and should take precedence over any other activity:

1. Improving productivity and reducing operating expenses
2. Retaining customers
3. Generating incremental revenue
4. Providing an outstanding customer experience

We at ClickFox hear these analysts loud and clear and agree with their evaluations for the coming year. That’s why ClickFox offers a unique Customer Experience Analytics solution that enable a company first to understand every customer interaction across all touch-points, and then take action to improve the customer experience while lowering operating costs. Our Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) solution models data from all customer interactions – email, website, chat, phone calls, retail, IVR, and more – enabling our customers to discover, improve, and drive the ideal customer experience for both their customers and for their company.

To read more about some of our recent results in several industries, head over to our download library and download our case studies.

There’s a new white paper in our download library that I wanted to make everyone aware of. The topic of discussion is customer satisfaction (CSAT) and how our customers have been leveraging ClickFox CEA to improve their CSAT metrics. Here a quick summary:

Customer satisfaction (CSAT), the measure of how products and services supplied by a company meet or surpass customer expectations, is a key performance indicator within the enterprise and in a competitive marketplace. Yet, CSAT is often an ambiguous and abstract concept because the actual manifestation of satisfaction levels varies widely across consumer populations and product segmentations. According to a recent Forrester Research report (“The Customer Experience Journey” by Bruce Temkin, Sept. 17, 2008), good customer experience has a high correlation to customer loyalty across virtually every industry vertical. The same report noted that, based on their surveys, customers are currently not satisfied with company interactions. Of all the different interaction channels (from in-person, to live phone agents, web and e-mail) the lowest level of customer satisfaction was related to phone-self service (IVR).

The following white paper explains real world customer satisfaction issues and shows how ClickFox CEA addresses such things as:

• What experiences lead to high/low CSAT scores?
• What were the reasons for a poor or favorable survey score?
• What behaviors need to be encouraged or discouraged that will favorably impact CSAT scores?
• How can CSAT be improved?

To read the entire white paper click here.

Our second event in the ClickFox Webinar Series, featuring Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research is now available for playback. Just click the link to register and view the rebroadcast.

Bruce highlighted the importance of customer experience in differentiating your company from the competition. He’s been speaking and writing about Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD) at Forrester and on his blog for a while now (read more at Customer Experience Matters). ClickFox highlighted how Customer Experience Analytics is helping companies gain valuable insight into customer behavior and is leading to significant improvements in customer loyalty and satisfaction.

We will soon announce our next event. To subscribe to our RSS feed and be notified of the next event, click here.

To replay the webinar follow this link.

Finding your competitive advantage using Customer Experience Analytics

There’s no question about it: It’s a tough time to be in business today. As companies tighten their belts and budgets, executives are forced to cut excess and prudently invest only in mission-critical projects with proven, hard ROI. In short, successfully weathering the storm means getting back to basics and that means renewing your focus on what really matters:- delivering an exceptional customer experience; running lean, highly efficient operations; creating market-differentiating products and services.

History has shown that in times of crisis, the winners and losers are separated not by how much they were able to slash costs, but rather by intelligently investing to build their competitive advantage. Instead of only focusing on retaining customers, they also look to attract and win new ones.

Are you using Customer Experience Analytics to help your enterprise adopt Experience-Based Differentiation measures to gain a competitive advantage? How would you describe your approach to customer experience? What are your obstacles to delivering an overall better customer experience? Are you obsessing about customer needs instead of product features? (Hint: You should be).

Join us as we invite Bruce Temkin of Forrester Research to explain how enterprises are heading down the path towards Experience-Based Differentiation (EBD) and embarking on the long journey to eventually embed EBD in their corporate culture. Bruce will dive into lessons learned from Fortune 500 companies who are differentiating themselves from their competition every day.

Speaker:
Featured Guest: Bruce D. Temkin – Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research

When:
1pm EST, December 11, 2008

Who Should Attend:
VPs of Customer Service/Customer Experience, CIOs, VP Marketing, all C-Level and Senior level managers responsible for customer service, the customer experience, customer service channel strategy, managing call center and self-service channel operations and costs.

Sign up today!

UPDATE: The recorded event can be viewed by clicking here.