ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

When potential customers ask us to explain why our Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) solution is different from anything else they have ever seen, we usually hear a follow up question mentioning the multi-channel capabilities of business intelligence and data warehouse vendors. Many people fail to realize that there is a tremendous difference between analyzing multiple channels as separate silos versus analyzing customer traversals across multiple customer interactions touch-points. When we refer to cross-channel analytics, we’re talking about the complete picture, not just several snapshots. We’re not discounting the significance of being able to look at multiple channels, we’re just saying that looking across the channels reveals hidden opportunities for the enterprise to understand customer behavior better and to create a better overall experience.

For example, I’ll take two channels that many companies use these days: Web & IVR. Almost every company with a website has some sort of analytics tool that helps it understand what customers are doing on the site, what they’re placing in their abandoned shopping carts or at what point in the bill pay process they decided to leave the site. When it comes to IVR, most of that kind of visibility is harder to understand because traditionally, the IVR has been a black box and at best companies know how many calls came in and how many went to a live agent. In some cases specific IVR self-service funnels are analyzed, but usually to the level of overall completion rate without the step-by-step details necessary to make any significant changes.

ClickFox CEA connects channels to show relationships in activities across multiple customer touch-points. In the example below, we can see that customers are moving from Web to IVR and focus on a specific event in the IVR experience. But that’s not all – we then look upstream at the activities that occurred in the Web channel prior to the event we’re focusing on (click image to enlarge):

This is a simple way to illustrate cross-channel analytics capabilities, but obviously this is just the starting point. ClickFox CEA also provides details in each interaction channel to show more specifics on what drives users to downstream channels and what they do when they get there. In our example, the details of upstream to downstream flows show instances of bill pay in the Web channel that lead to significant instances of bill pay in IVR channel. The cheaper web channel is actually the root cause for the far more expensive IVR transaction (order of magnitude is about x10) which can then lead to a far more expensive live agent interaction (order of magnitude is about x100+ that of a web session). When analyzing cross-channel traversals these kinds of details become painfully clear (click to enlarge):

Cost savings is not the only reason companies need to understand their customers’ cross-channel experiences. Negative experiences will almost always lead to poor customer satisfaction and the real possibility of customer churn. And there are many other interaction channels in today’s complex customer environment. Starting with a pair of channels is just the first step, but eventually additional channels (Email, Kiosk, ATM, CTI, CSAT, CRM, Live Agent, etc.) are needed to complete the whole picture.

For more on cross-channel design & analysis,  please join ClickFox and featured guest Adele Sage of Forrester Research for a complimentary webinar on April 30th, 2009 at 2pm EST:

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.

Register Today!

In the beginning there was complete chaos. Companies were focused on their products and their bottom line and the customer was just a mere afterthought. But eventually competition caught up with everyone and nobody was safe. Customers had more options and they wanted to be treated well or they would just walk away. The idea that an organization actually had a relationship with its customers was quite revolutionary at the time and companies realized that they needed some way to manage those relationships.

And so, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications surfaced and an entire industry was created to help companies wrap their arms around these new technologies and methodologies. CRM was and still is a complex solution and has become fragmented across the organization. There are several flavors of CRM (Operational, Sales Force Automation, Analytical, Campaign Management and recently, talks of Social CRM) and many vendors battling for market share in an economy that is tough on spending. And spending on complex, long implementations is not something that people enjoy.

About a decade ago a new term, Customer Experience Management (CEM) was coined in the marketplace. Where CRM focused on how the company tracks the information it has on its customers, CEM put the focus on the customers themselves. The customer was no longer a byproduct but rather the main focus of the company. The experiences were a new source of information for the company in a competitive environment. They could be mined and dissected in order to give the company actionable insights from interactions.

CEM became an industry standard and a hot topic. But CEM was, and still is, focused around customer-to-agent interactions and in today’s market that’s just not enough. Customers have more ways to interact with a company than ever before. Customers expect to have the best experience every time they reach out and interact with a company. Every time and in any way. And the industry is starting to evolve and look at other interaction methods. So lately, CEM has slowly morphed into Contact Center Performance Management (CCPM).

But there’s a bigger issue. These customer interactions are usually analyzed in a silo or even worse, in a vacuum. However, interactions don’t occur in a vacuum, they are actually part of a timeline. Something happens before, between and after these interactions. Only when you put together all these events can you start to understand the true customers’ experience, from their point of view.

So that’s where Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) comes in. CEA is the next step in the evolution of understanding the customer experience. Seeing the experience through the eyes of the customers allows a company to match the customers with the way the want to be treated. Customers has a unique behavioral DNA and specific behavior patterns. Would they rather use the website to pay a bill but feel more comfortable talking to a live agent when they need a new card? Would they rather deposit a check at an ATM or with a live teller inside the branch? Is there a specific segment of your customer base that would rather do one over the other?

CEA allows a company to look at every interaction individually at every touch-point and combine them all into a comaplete experience. It exposes customer behavior patterns that are very difficult to understand otherwise. CEA enables a company to engage their customers like never before and provide them with the most delightful experience possible that match their needs.

The silos are gone! Viva la evolution!

Click here to read more about how your company can make the move from contact center to contact centric and how Customer Experience Analytics can complement and leverage your existing CCPM solution.

Our very own Chief Marketing Officer, Anna Convery, will be speaking tomorrow morning, Jan. 22nd 2009 at 7:30am EST, at the Technology Association of Georgia’s CRM Society event titled “The State of the CRM Industry.”

Where:
Oracle – Building 500, Suite 1120
1100 Abernathy Road
Atlanta, GA

When:
Thursday, Jan 22, 2009
07:30 AM – 09:00 AM

Other Panelists:
Bruce Culbert, CEO, iSymmetry, Chairman and Co-Founder, myCRMcareer.com
Mark Storm, Regional Vice President, Salesforce.com

You can register for the event by clicking here.

ClickFox has received the 2008 Product of the Year award by Customer Interaction Solutions Magazine. Our flagship product, ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) was honored for outstanding innovation. Here’s a summary of today’s press release:

ATLANTA ,GA – January 14, 2009 – ClickFox, Inc., the defining leader of Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) software and solutions, announced today that the ClickFox CEA solution has received a 2008 Product of the Year Award from Technology Marketing Corporation’s (TMC) Customer Interaction Solutions magazine, the leading publication covering CRM, call centers and teleservices since 1982.

“I am pleased to honor ClickFox for their hard work and accomplishments. Their commitment to quality and excellence benefit the contact center experience as well as ROI for the companies that use them,” said Nadji Tehrani, Executive Group Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of Customer Interaction Solutions.  “For 11 years, Customer Interaction Solutions magazine has recognized the companies which demonstrate excellence in technological advancement and application refinements.”

Read the full Press Release here.

ClickFox has recently published a couple of case studies that we wanted to make sure you were aware of. These case studies are based on real world data and show how Customer Experience Analytics has enabled corporation to better understand their customers and gain tremendous business advantages. For the financial industry, we published a case study titled Harnessing the Value of Customer Behavior Insights at a Global Financial Services Powerhouse. Here’s the case study overview:

One of the world’s largest financial institutions serves individual consumers, small and middle market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial and risk-management products and services. They are top-tier globally in terms of deposits, assets and debit and credit cards, serving millions of consumers and businesses, guided by a corporate mission to provide unmatched customer convenience.

A very active customer base generates over 1.3 billion calls per year handled by self-and assisted-service channels. A corporate strategic goal was to raise customer satisfaction and delight combined with a key tactical goal to improve self-service automation rates and experience. The organization wanted to understand how their customers actually move through a variety of self and assisted processes. Most pressing was a desire to discover the paths and actual customer experiences within the interactive voice response (IVR) system, given the call volumes and the bank’s abiding principle of offering customer convenience.

To register and view the complete financial industry case study, click here.

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The second case study is for the utility industry and is titled Cross-Channel Customer Experience Analysis at U.S. Fortune 500 Natural Gas Distributor. Here’s the case study overview:

A Fortune 500 natural gas distributor currently serves over 2 million customers in multiple states, growing its customer base dramatically over the last couple of years. A key challenge facing this utility is to match a commitment to customer service satisfaction while maintaining their reputation as one of the most efficient natural gas distribution companies in the United States.

At the end of 2007, the company chose ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) on-demand solution to analyze voice self-service for customers calling into U.S.-based call centers. Single channel analysis of the voice self-service customer experience began in early 2008 and was followed by a broader, cross-channel analysis combining voice/ Interactive Voice Response (IVR), CRM/Agent Desktop and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) data. The company was looking for a clear picture of customer traversal through self-and assisted service channels overlaid with CSAT feedback to gain understanding of customer paths and how they correlate to customer experience.

To register and view the complete utility industry case study, click here.

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We will be publishing several new case studies in the following weeks. Next up are case studies for the telecom and healthcare industries. Be sure to check back often.

Welcome to our brand new blog!

ClickFox is the pioneering leader of a new field called Customer Experience Analytics (CEA). So what does that mean exactly? In a nutshell, CEA software synthesizes all information from all customer touch-points in an integrated, visual view to understand and manage the “Total Customer Experience.”

Customers are multi-dimensional beings; their true behavior is manifested in a complex web of interactions. So why settle for only a limited single-channel window of understanding into the customer experience? By pulling together data from all your systems (from IVR & CRM/agent desktops to web and email to handheld devices and kiosks, among others), ClickFox CEA connects the dots with visually intuitive mappings of all your customer interactions to reveal hidden connections and powerful customer insights.

With this holistic view, you can build a significant competitive advantage by enabling better, faster decision-making on fundamental questions, such as: What is the ideal customer experience? Where are we falling short and why? Why do individual customers defect? Where and why do customers get frustrated as they move through our different channels? What really drives 1st contact resolution, effective cross-selling and other key metrics? Where should we best invest our limited time and resources?

So stay tuned right here. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll give you access to white papers, case studies, recorded webinars, sneak peeks into new product releases, how-to video guides and more. We hope you’ll join us in some lively discussion as we open the floor to questions and we get to know each other better.

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