ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

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.”

Read the full press release here.

You can also read a Utility Industry Case Study or our Utility Industry Brief.

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.

Also, you can find several industry specific case studies in our download library.

ClickFox today released a free interactive Customer Experience ROI Calculator and we invite everyone to try it out. Focused mostly on operational efficiency, this real world calculator was designed based on previous engagements with leading, world-class organizations across several industries. These companies have already realized millions of dollars in cost savings by identifying ways to serve their customers more efficiently across different interaction channels.

We tried to keep it as simple as possible and all you need to do to use the ROI calculator is enter the number of customers your company serves. The tool then calculates your potential ROI using default data gathered from ClickFox’s growing repository representing billions of complex customer interactions. You can then play around with many optional parameter ranging from cost per interaction and channel-to-channel transfer rates, to specific measurements such as annual self-service containment improvement goals.

There’s also a quick instructional video to help you get started.

When you’re done, you’ll be able to download a customized ROI Report, which includes graphs showing potential operations savings over a 5-year period. The report provides details on specific areas of impact that have been identified as having the most significant and immediate effect on an organization’s bottom line. This also includes real-world examples of customers who have achieved huge returns using CEA.

“ClickFox’s calculator is extremely useful for demonstrating the tangible financial benefits of cross-channel customer experience analytics,” said Marco Pacelli, chief executive officer of ClickFox. “The calculator was built not just for customer experience decision makers, but also executives in finance, sales and marketing, product development and more, who need to understand the impact that customer experience has on their departments and the overall business.”

The ROI Calculator is available as a free tool at http://www.clickfox.com/resources/roi-calculator.

We announced today that we’ve grown our processing volume to over 750 million customer transactions per month, up from 500 million earlier this year. These complex cross-channel customer interactions span across multi touch-points and include Web, IVR, CTI, CSAT, Live Agents, Handheld Devices, Interactive Kiosks and others.

“No other company has gathered such a complete, collective data set that truly represents today’s varied, complex cross-channel customer,” said Marco Pacelli, chief executive officer of ClickFox. “As we continue to grow our customer base, this wealth of data deepens our domain expertise so we can identify and apply proven best practices for our Fortune 500 customers, many of whom have already realized hundred-million dollar ROIs.”

Read the entire press release here.

Next Steps:

Watch an 8 minute demo of ClickFox CEA.

Read our CEA White Paper.

A new press release today details how a top-tier telecommunications organization, a current ClickFox customer, has decided to expand their CEA deployment to now include all customer interactions. Based on a proven track record of multi-million dollar results with ClickFox CEA, this leading wireless provider will leverage both existing and new interaction analysis to further improve operational efficiency, customer retention, revenue generation and customer satisfaction.

From the release:

“The telecommunications industry is challenged with steep competition, high customer churn and highly publicized customer satisfaction issues. These issues need to be constantly monitored and analyzed, and limited analysis doesn’t deliver the insights that drive major, bottom-line changes,” said Marco Pacelli, chief executive officer of ClickFox. “ClickFox CEA provides unprecedented levels of insight to all our telecommunications customers by unlocking high-value, time-sensitive information from previously inaccessible sources, including structured and unstructured data.”

Read the full press release here.

Also, download our telco case study here for some additional examples.

Consumers and enterprises are expected to increase interactions with their financial service providers in response to the current economic climate as they strive to re-evaluate finances and shift around assets. Each of these interactions represents the potential to keep or lose important customers, according to Forrester Research, which two years ago defined customer experience as “one of the key skills for survival in the financial services industry.” That prediction seems even more relevant today as financial institutions strive to retain customers in a climate with few, if any, growth opportunities in the short term.

ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) enables some of the world’s leading banking and financial institutions to understand and drive the ideal customer experience by leveraging the significant amount they’ve already invested in automated systems and data collection. By translating complex customer interactions across multiple, self- and assisted service channels – touchtone or speech-enabled Voice self-service, Email, Web, Chat, Agent Desktop/CRM, Kiosks – ClickFox turns data into fact-based insights for optimizing cross-channel business performance and improving overall customer experience.

You can download the Finance Industry Brief now.

And don’t forget to register for our next webinar on Oct. 29th at 1pm: What top-performing banks already know about Customer Experience.

Last week TMCnet.com published an article discussing the ways that Customer Experience Analytics can help companies overcome the shortcomings of BI tools. Here is a short excerpt from the article:

Certain surveys have found that only 13 percent of companies implementing BI tools will ever achieve their original business objectives. Market research has shown that of surveyed executives in Fortune 500 companies:

76 percent were forced to make decisions because not all the information was available in time
63 percent believe that BI reports are simply reference documents used to justify a decision after it was made
70 percent do not receive reports that provide predictions about problems or potential opportunities.

In today’s complex customer interaction environment, it is becoming increasingly more difficult to navigate through the data jungle in order to find what you’re really looking for. While companies have invested heavily in building multiple customer interaction touch-points, they have neglected to understand that their customers will ultimately decide how they want to interact with them in the first place. Instead of focusing on cross-channel customer behavior patterns, customer tendencies and the ability to understand customer intent, they have been focusing on analyzing customer interactions in silos and using BI tools to generate limited insight.

Although the shortcomings of BI tools can be easily overcome by using new CEA solutions, this does not mean that the time and money invested in BI has gone to waste. On the contrary, a well-designed BI solution with a powerful schema can be used as one of the data feeds into a new CEA system. By combining the capabilities of both systems, working in unison, results will be achieved much faster and with greater ease.

To read more about the ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics solution, download the white paper or view the ClickFox CEA5 Product Demo.

We are happy to announce our new partnership with Greenplum this morning. Greenplum Software is the pioneer of Enterprise Data Cloud™ solutions for large-scale data warehousing and analytics, providing customers with next-generation capabilities including elastic expansion and sandboxing, multi-petabyte scale on commodity hardware, and massively parallel analytic processing.

“One of ClickFox’s top priorities is keeping the technology relevant so it exceeds customer needs,” said William Hawley,chief operating officer (COO) of ClickFox. “Our integration to Greenplum reinforces that goal to provide highly optimized speed in processing customer behavior and cross-channel analytics. ClickFox currently processes over half a billion multi-channel customer interactions per month for some of the nation’s largest businesses and service providers across industries, and this figure is expected to double in 2010.  By giving our customers and partners access to the benefits of the ClickFox-Greenplum integration, we offer them the best of customer experience analytics combined with massively scalable, proven grid computing. Ultimately this translates into faster speed-to-intelligence and improved business operations.”

Read the entire press release here.

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!

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.