ClickFox's Customer Experience Analytics Blog

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Understand your Customers as Individuals, Not Individual Transactions – Featuring Bruce Temkin

Thursday, March 18^th 1:00 pm EST

Forrester analyst Bruce Temkin estimates that customer experience quality could cause swings of $242 million for a large bank and $184 million for a large retailer, but also notes that one of the biggest challenges to success is a lack of cooperation across the organization. Chances are, you already know how customers interact  in stores, on web sites or with call centers, but looking at these interactions independently of each other creates huge ‘blind spots’ resulting in increased operations costs and customer churn. Connecting the dots between service channels delivers a complete picture of customer experience, not just several individual snapshots, for true customer-centric improvement strategies.

Join Bruce Temkin and ClickFox CMO Anna Convery to learn how best-in-class companies are applying a cross-channel approach to customer experience to:

• visualize customer experience across all retail, web, voice self service, and live agent interactions
• apply the appropriate mix of highly efficient, lower cost customer service options
• build a behavioral model for deep analysis into customer paths, trends, and preferences
• understand the direct impact of experiences on CSAT, churn and future buying behavior
• predict and proactively respond to potential churn with highly effective retention strategies

Attendees will hear several powerful case studies illustrating how cross-channel customer experience analytics is delivering multi-million dollar insights and enabling organizations to finally understand their customers as individuals rather than a series of individual transactions.

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You can also watch a replay of our previous webinar with Bruce Temkin, Finding Your Competitive Advantage with Customer Experience Analytics, 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!

I came across an interesting article titled “Overheard – The IT department decides what data you get to see?” that raises a lot of very valuable points about the shortcomings of current BI tools. One of the things that jumps at you right away is a quote from Forrester Principal Analyst, Boris Evelson, who is quoted (from a different article):

“One bank CIO recently told me ‘We had the data, but we did not have the information,’” said Evelson, shaking his head.

This is something we hear from our customers on a regular basis. Coupled with the fact that a recent Forrester survey shows that over 40% of enterprise IT decision makers use three to five BI solutions (more than 20% of CIOs surveyed said they run six or more BI tools!) and you start to understand where the confusion comes from. How is it even possible to know what to look for in that jungle of data and tools?

One of the differentiators of the ClickFox CEA solution from standard BI tools is that it doesn’t require you to come up with a question to ask. ClickFox CEA will analyze your data, visualize your customers’ experiences in and across any interaction touch-points you may offer and automatically generate a default report (we call traffic viewer) to show you where everyone is going and what they’re doing. We also automatically generate dominant paths that show you customer preferences and behavior patterns. Armed with this knowledge you can then dive deeper into certain behaviors and analyze specific customer pain points.

Another differentiator is that unlike traditional BI tools that show you a lot of “how much of something  happened”, ClickFox shows you what happened and why. Rather than going through multiple tables of endless data and trying to extract information from them, we lay out customer behavior in a way that lets you easily understand where things went wrong and what you might want to do to fix the problems.

And one last point to touch on, which is a pretty big issue when dealing with multiple data sources – ClickFox CEA can ingest data from any system in any format, so you’re not stuck in the old-world of silo analytics any longer. This way, instead of analyzing data with multiple BI tools for several different business silos, you can combine all the information in ClickFox CEA and see the complete customer experience, from beginning to end. You can also see cross-channel behavior patterns and trend customer behavior over time. So when a customer goes to your retail location, then checks your website, then calls your speech IVR and eventually gets routed through a CTI server to a live agent – you see the entire interaction in one place (if you kept count, that’s 5 interaction touch-points). Ask yourself the following question: Can your existing BI tools easily give you this kind of visibility?

To read more about the ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics process, click this link and download our technical white paper.

And if you have any comments (agree / disagree) or questions, we’d love to hear from you too.