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).

There’s been some recent media coverage of ClickFox that we wanted to share with our blog readers.

First off, we had a great time at SpeechTEK 2010, participated in a couple of panels and presentation and met some interesting attendants at the exhibit hall and the networking event. Our VP of Business Development was interviewed on BnetTV.com and you can view that video here:

Next up is a fantastic article in Contact Center Pipeline Magazine that discusses why consistent service delivery across channels requires a unified view of the customer that breaks down departmental barriers. We’ll have a lot more on this topic in upcoming weeks but to get your started you can read the article here: Multichannel Feedback (PDF).

ClickFox was also mentioned in a couple of recent articles by one of our board members, Geoff Oblak, and his company Ascent Venture Partners. In the first article over at The Motley Fool, Mr. Oblak talks about why Data Intelligence Is the Next Big Thing. In a another article on ReadWriteWeb, they try to pick the brain of Matt Fates, a partner at Ascent Venture Partners to see what’s Inside the Mind of an Early Stage Venture Capitalist.

Don’t forget to download a complimentary copy (an $895 value) of a Datamonitor/Ovum report that discusses the complex customer interaction landscape, and explains why ClickFox is addressing cross-channel analytics “in the most valuable way for enterprises”. The report is available for a limited time, so hurry over and download it here.

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.

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.

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

ClickFox today announced the launch of ClickFoxGO!, a new packaged software and services offering aimed at companies with light to moderate interaction volumes and limited customer service channels. The ClickFoxGO! solution will enable companies of any size to gain deep and powerful insight into customer experience trends and issues faster, easier, and more affordably than ever before.

Leveraging the industry-leading ClickFox CEA technology ClickFoxGO! will deliver advanced dashboards and reporting of high-level customer experience improvement opportunities. Marco Pacelli, ClickFox CEO, says:

“We’ve seen the adoption rate of customer experience analytics grow tremendously in the past few years, but it still remains largely concentrated around large-scale organizations. ClickFox is expanding its offerings to meet the demand for more accessible and affordable solutions to ensure that organizations of all sizes can benefit from customer behavior analysis and insight. This cost-effective solution will deliver immediate ROI and a better understanding of customer paths, preferences and service needs.”

ClickFoxGO! packages are available for a single interaction channel (such as IVR), or cross-channel environments, and include:

• Up to 5 million analyzed customer interactions per month
• Analytics powered by the ClickFox CEA core engine
• Solution hosting and data retention for 13 months
• ClickFox professional services

Contact us for more information on ClickFoxGO!

PS: Don’t forget that there’s still time to fill out our customer tipping point survey for a chance to win an iPad.

Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati, an expert on leadership, strategy, and organizational issues in firms, recently engaged in a Q&A sessions where he discussed how companies can become more customer-centric. He explains why companies with an outside-in perspective aim to provide solutions for customers, while those with an inside-out orientation, on the other hand, just focus on products, sales, and the organization. In his new book ‘Reorganize for Resilience: Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business’, he finds that customer-centric companies tracked between 2001 and 2007 delivered shareholder returns of 150% while the S&P 500 delivered 14%.

One of the main points in the interview is what we here at ClickFox have been helping our customers do for the past decade – break down informational silos in the enterprise to allow true comprehensive cross-channel understanding of the customer experience. Says Gulati:

The more I researched, the more it became apparent that the problem had to do with internal silos. Most organizations today are still typically built around product and geography, and do not have a clear line of sight to the customer. These silos not only create proverbial blind spots for firms but also impede coordinated action toward addressing what may be identified as central for their customers. As I show in my book, you don’t always have to bust silos; in most instances, you sometimes have to simply find ways to bridge them. Ultimate success cannot come without a supple organization that has fluid internal and external boundaries.

The article is full of great insight into the journey a company must take to become customer-centric. Gulati has some examples of these processes and companies who have made the choice to change the way they view their customers. Read the complete article here.

Go here to watch a demo video of ClickFox CEA and how it helps organizations understand customer behavior across multiple interaction channels.