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.”
There are so many terrific blogs related to customer experience that we decided to add a monthly update to our blogroll with some of the stand-outs. Here are our recommendations for March 2010:
2. The Perfect Customer Experience – Written by Dale Wolf, this blog focuses on customer experience marketing, marketplace conversations, social media and demand generation. They define the perfect customer experience as one which results in customers becoming advocates for the company, creating referral, retention and profitable growth.
3. Customer Experience Crossroads – Written by Susan Abbott, this blog is about branded customer experiences and how to create them. You’ll find some great out-of-the-box ideas and topics here.
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”.
CRM Magazine today released their choices for The 2010 CRM Service Awards and ClickFox has been recognized with the Rising Star Award. The editors of CRM Magazine explain that the CRM Service Awards are designed to remind us that technology plays a critical role in the customer experience. Even in those rare moments when we do have choice, we’d better also have the benefit of information, lest we squander it. That probably makes information one of the cornerstones of service, as well. Describing the Rising Star Awards, they say:
In their short lives they’ve been able to empower and enable the delivery of high-quality service to their clients’ customers.
What’s more, this year’s winners have accomplished that feat during a period of economic recession, a trying set of circumstances that have hamstrung companies 10 times their size and resulted in lasting repercussions not only with startups but with their current and prospective clients as well.
“I was impressed when ClickFox took apart its application and tuned it to specific applications aimed at specific business processes,” says Keith Dawson, principal analyst for information and communication technologies at Frost & Sullivan. “When you do that in a space that has had trouble getting traction—like analytics—it’s a sign that there’s a realization you need to actually produce the goods and not just talk about them.”
Join us for our next webinar 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.
ClickFox announced today that it has signed a multi-year contract with a leading Fortune 500 energy company to analyze several million monthly customer interactions across a variety of service channels. The organization will use ClickFox CEA to track and analyze customer behavior across their web site, interactive voice response (IVR) system and call center (including agent desktop, call routing and electronic dialogue) to get a complete picture of the full experience from the customer’s point of view.
Says Marco Pacelli, ClickFox CEO:
“This new relationship further deepens ClickFox’s domain expertise in the energy industry and adds to an already impressive roster of Fortune 500 utility companies. With the addition of this customer, we now have insight into customer behavior for nearly 40 million energy consumers in the US, enabling us to focus on the most critical areas impacting their experiences and develop industry best practices for cross-channel customer experience excellence.”
Last week at Amdocs’ Partner Sales Organization annual partner event in Las Vegas, ClickFox was recognized as ‘Emerging Partner of the Year’. As a strategic partner of Amdocs for over a year, ClickFox offers the only true cross-channel software solution on the market, enabling unparalleled visibility into customer experience for improved operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and customer retention. Says Marco Pacelli, ClickFox CEO:
“ClickFox is honored to be recognized by Amdocs as an emerging partner. We look forward to expanding our reach into the marketplace as one of the only combined solutions that delivers insight into today’s complete, end-to-end customer experience.”
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.
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.
CRM Magazine today released their choices for 
