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!

Last week, during our webinar ‘What Consumers Really Want‘, we shared the results from our recent survey about customer tipping points.

Overall, the findings point to the powerful relationship between customer experience and revenue and highlight a critical need for companies to stop looking at service operations as cost centers, and instead view every interaction as an opportunity to increase satisfaction, build loyalty, and grow revenue. The following report details the findings and analysis of the survey results, and highlights what this valuable customer insight means for today’s enterprise.

Click here to read the Customer Tipping Point Survey Results.

We also invite you to read our previous Customer Interaction Survey Results or view our recent webinar replay.

We’d like to thanks everyone who participated in the survey for their time. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments.

We had a fantastic turnout yesterday for our webinar titled “Understand Your Customers as Individuals, Not Individual Transaction” in which Bruce Temkin of Forrester and ClickFox CMO, Anna Convery, discussed how best-in-class companies are applying a cross-channel approach to customer experience.

To view the replay of the event, click here.

We are currently compiling the questions from the event’s Q&A session and will share them separately in a future post. If you have any questions after watching the webinar please let us know in the comments section.

ClickFox hosted an excellent webinar event yesterday titled “The Hundred-Million Self Service Question” which is now available for replay. Click the link to find out what the answer is:

The answer to this question is right under your nose and contained in your customers’ everyday transaction data history – from kiosks, web site, and IVR systems. Join us to learn how several top-tier organizations reported $200MM cost savings after they discovered the specific areas driving self-service failure and increased live agent calls – simply by analyzing customers’ paths across the multiple channels they interact with.

To view the entire webinar replay, click here.

To view all our other webinars (and there are a lot of them to chose from), visit our download library.

Yesterday’s webinar about Customer Experience Analytics in Finance is now available for replay:

Today’s financial services providers are driven to discover new and innovative ways to reduce costs while simultaneously improving customer experience to remain competitive. Join ClickFox, the pioneering leader in customer experience analytics to learn how the nation’s leading financial services providers realized hundreds of millions of dollars in annual savings by analyzing the paths of their customers.

Watch the webinar replay now!

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.

On October 1st, at 1pm EST, we will host a webinar titled “Dramatically Reduce Customer Churn and Build Loyalty with Customer Experience Analytics:”

Increased competition within today’s marketplace and customer demand for diverse communication methods means that companies must address customer experience across all available service channels to stay profitable. However, traditional approaches only provide a one-dimensional view into customer behavior patterns, offering little to no insight into retention opportunities.

Join us to hear how one of the nation’s largest service providers was able to save over 1,500 customers per month by analyzing specific behavior patterns leading to dissatisfaction and churn. ClickFox CEA delivers a powerful view of customer experience across all touch points, enabling companies to proactively respond with highly effective, customer-centric retention strategies.

Attendees will learn how several world-class organizations across industries are using ClickFox CEA to:

• Gain insight into which specific customer experiences lead to negative and positive CSAT scores
• Understand and quantify the relationship between low CSAT scores and likelihood of customer churn
• Implement targeted process and retention strategies based on comprehensive customer insight across all channels

Limited seats are available – reserve your seat today.

We just announced a new event in our ongoing webinar series titled “Understanding Cross-Channel Customer Experience in Retail” and it’s now open for registration.

Here are some more details:

You may know a lot about your customers, and you know they are interacting with you across many channels… But can you easily access that information and are you putting it to work for you?

Customer information and customer interactions are a retailer’s most valuable asset. But being able to understand comprehensive cross-channel customer experience and gaining actionable insights from that information either is too difficult or too expensive… Until now.

ClickFox’s Customer Experience Analytics solution can help you easily aggregate both customer information and cross-channel customer behavior patterns into one single source for sales, marketing, operations and business performance information, providing powerful analytics tools to improve decision making across your organization.

Join us as we discuss how you can:

• Integrate customer experience analysis with customer information to promote your strategic objectives
• Provide consistent service across all channels
• Gain a complete picture of your customers
• Target customer segments for tailored programs
• Stock the right products and services, in the right channels at the right time
• Streamline customer service processes for a substantial competitive advantage

In this webinar we will share use cases illustrating how retail organizations utilize customer experience analytics to:

• Deliver a superior customer experience
• Drive improvements to achieve operational excellence
• Improve customer retention & satisfaction
• Leverage marketing insight

To view all of our upcoming webinars, please click 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!

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!