ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

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!

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 is one of several vendors featured in a recent Forrester Research report titled “Real Time Analytics for Contact Centers” which points at a lack of meaningful customer data as a major challenge for contact centers. According to the report:

“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. Although typical reporting practices segment data from separate channels, they don’t reveal the entire story of the customer’s experience.”

Speaking specifically about ClickFox, the report says:

“ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics offers a unique capability with its Task Analysis engine that examines key customer activities and adds its Artificial Intelligence engine to identify discrepancies between system design and actual interactions across multiple channels to provide meaningful insight.”

Register to download the complete report 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.

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.

We recently announced another event in the ClickFox Webinar Series. Here are the details:

Today’s customers have a variety of preferences and expectations that make managing customer experience data complex. The comprehensive customer experience is defined by the collective interactions they have with the enterprise, and the ability to analyze these interactions enables a company to proactively provide an optimal experience at every touch point.

Register today!

Join ClickFox and featured guest Adele Sage of Forrester Research for a complimentary webinar:

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.

Speakers:
Marco Pacelli, CEO of ClickFox, and Anna Convery, CMO of ClickFox, will overview ClickFox CEA (Customer Experience Analytics), a unique software solution that models information from all customer interactions across the enterprise — Contact Center, IVR, call routing, website, chat, retail/POS, mobile devices, email, and more. CEA provides insights and recommendations that enable a company to successfully balances two mission critical goals: providing customers with productive, satisfying experiences, and leveraging cost effective customer service options.

Featured Guest:
Adele Sage, Analyst with Forrester Research will discuss Best Practices in Cross-Channel Design, delving into why customers become dissatisfied as they navigate across channels, and why lack of consistency, continuity and insight into cross channel experience is impacting customer experience. Adele will share the current state of cross-channel analysis and experience, best practices in cross-channel design, and how companies can use this opportunity to differentiate themselves with a seamless, integrated cross-channel experience.

When:
April 30, 2009 – 2:00pm-3:00pm EST

Who Should Attend:
CIOs, CMOs, VPs and Directors of Customer Care, Customer Service, Customer Experience, Claims

Register today!

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.