The ClickFox Blog

View of the Journey - Highlights from Enterprise Management 360 podcast

Thu, 30 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Many tools let you see what's going on in a particular channel. You can understand that the volume of customers coming to your website has gone measurably up, or you can see that more people are coming to your retail store, and you may not know the root-cause of this particular event. It may be because there was a marketing event that happened downstream. It could be some other external factor that you are not aware of.

What you need to be successful in this day and age is compelling visual representations of how people are moving in and through your different systems. With Clickfox, you can see different ways you have of providing information to your customer so that you can gain insight into how your customers are behaving. Once you can see your customer's experiences, you can improve it.

For more information, check out the full podcast at: http://www.enterprisemanagement360.com/press_release/clickfox-podcast-interview-live-on-em360-website/

Start with the Data - Highlights from the Enterprise Management 360 podcast

Tue, 28 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Customers look for specific answers in different platforms and technologies. The high level goals are finding the platform or technology that will provide meaningful actionable insight into what is going on in your corporation. These technologies should adapt as your corporation changes without long lead times and development times. This is critical for the initial solution, and then also to changes your enterprise over time.

Data is built and can be accessed by skilled database administrators and IT professionals; however most of the work of giving context to these models is actually done by business people. At Clickfox, we don't have a database architect designing schemas in the background to solve the particular business problem that our customers have asked us to solve. We take the data and we a journey or a transition from one state to another. That is a high level business function that will satisfy his/her business. The process of identifying and labeling that a transaction is done by business people – IT people are not needed. So it incredibly simplifies the process of adding context and meaning to the data, and I think this is one of our biggest advantages is that we layer the different types of interactions and give them context and meaning in a vernacular way that they understand.

For more information, check out the full podcast at: http://www.enterprisemanagement360.com/press_release/clickfox-podcast-interview-live-on-em360-website/

How do you know your customers take the right path?

Tue, 21 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

How do you know your customers take the right path?

You invest in new customer service technologies to:

Make it easy, convenient for customers to do business with you
Increase customer satisfaction, loyalty
Reduce your cost of doing business

But these systems:

Are large, complex and have issues
Frustrate customers, causing them to go straight to an agent or down the wrong path
The wrong path always costs you more money, loss of customers, loss of reputation

In an article from Bloomberg Big Data Technology section, To Catch Up With E-tail, Tools to Track Shoppers in the Store, the premise is that retailers do not have the same level of insight into what each shopper is looking at while in the store. A person, who is lost or confused in the store, can ask for help. A sales associate can see when they are confused and may need help. In an online or phone interaction, the customer may take different paths and be frustrated. That person could leave, get angry or just take a very long time to compete a simple transaction. How do you ‘see’ where they go between your systems?

Big Data Ecosystem

Thu, 16 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

Companies today are storing massive volumes of data but aren't even seeing a fraction of the potential value because of the limitations within their systems or organizations. Large companies are looking for value in their Big Data. While there is a growing number of companies offering products and technologies, one thing is certain, there is not one of these systems that provide answers for every question. There are systems for storing data, rapidly processing data, making charts and graphs of data. All of these systems require careful planning and implementation by dedicated IT departments.

Clickfox is an interesting part of the Big Data Ecosystem

Our Customer Experience Analytics Platform (CEA) leverages the significant amount you have already invested in automated service and data collection systems. We can take the large amounts of meta data that are already created and reveal to you the way your customers move through your systems. Rather than a single channel view, that is seeing how someone uses your call center, we can show you how someone goes to your retail store, then makes a call or visits the website. This integrated view comes from data you already have. Our platform leverages what you have to give you a unique view into your own systems. Our process is not a snapshot because we continually add data so you can see the impact of changes to your organization.

Common Challenges – Unique Solution

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:00:00 -0500

The concept of Big Data – data from social media, the Web, purchase history and other sources – contains a wealth of information for organizations. Big Data, such as customer data, can be leveraged to drive revenue, reduce expenses, manage risk and improve the overall customer experience. However, most companies face challenges with the best way to extract value from Big Data.

These challenges fall into 3 groups:

1. Making sense out of data

Big data volume (up to 1 billion customer touch points per year per company)
Multiple, inconsistent sources of data (IVF, agent, website, retail, etc)
Data Quality issues

2. Driving to actionable insights rapidly

Keeping a tight link with priority business opportunities
Difficulty identifying issues within vast quantities of data
‘Paralysis by Analysis’ – possibilities are almost infinite

3. Real time execution

Long wait and large analytical effort required to get results
Driving change across organization silos
Building capabilities – getting the right people the right data

These are challenges faced by all companies who are looking for the value in Big Data. ClickFox has the solution. Since 56% of all customer interactions happen during a multi-event, multi-channel journey – look at the journey, not the touch point. Journeys represent a evolution in thinking over the traditional touchpoint (or ‘moment’) approach.

What other approaches have you used to solve these challenges?

Need help analyzing all that data from your speech and text mining solutions? We do that too!

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 00:00:00 -0500

Over the past few months we've seen increased interest from our customers who are extending the scope of their ClickFox CEA solution to include speech and text analytics vendors' data sets. One of the top 3 banks as well as a top cable provider have added their speech and text analytics data to the CEA system to provide a higher level of accuracy in their usage. These data insights can come from various vendors such as Nexidia, NICE, Verint, Clarabridge, SAS and others, and from diverse interaction channels such as web, email, chat, IVR, agent records and social channels.

ClickFox rapidly increases the ability for enterprises to gain value from existing speech vendors' data sets by connecting the dots of customer behavior patterns to isolate targeted voice trends for deeper analytics. Without the added insight provided by ClickFox CEA enterprises are forced to perform rigorous manual analytics functions across the entirety of their speech and text data stores. ClickFox CEA now provides a more strategic approach to analyzing speech and text analytics by allowing analysts to specifically target focused datasets for faster and more insightful analysis.

For example, ClickFox was able to narrow the query into the speech analytics system from a base of several hundred thousand calls to a much smaller subset of calls. This allowed the analysts to find the avoidable agent repeat calls taking place after customers had visited the online channel and prior to them providing a low c-sat survey score.

Marco Pacelli, ClickFox CEO says: “Our customers have told us that we have been instrumental in being able to increase the efficiency of speech analytics. Best analogy – ClickFox gets our customers to the goal line and speech scores the touchdown. The marriage of these tools has been invaluable to really get underneath and demystify the level of effort and causes for defect.”

ClickFox CEA will empower companies to more accurately target customer experience behavioral patterns within the vast speech and text analytics data stores. With ClickFox CEA, analysts can also identify more defined queries to better understand which customers or contact channels reveal the most insightful conversations as well as validate the CRM resolution code interpreted by comparing it to the upstream intent of the customer. By analyzing more refined data sets, companies experience a quicker time to value, and ultimately, greater efficiency in painting a holistic view of the customer experience data present within the organization. Additionally, other business functions and teams can capitalize on the knowledge revealed by speech and text analysis by integrating the data back into ClickFox CEA software to improve the 360-degree perspective of the customer journey.

ClickFox to Showcase Big Data Customer Behavior Insights at Forrester Customer Experience Forum in New York

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0500

We wanted to let everyone know that we'll be attending and exhibiting at Forrester's Customer Experience Forum 2012 East, “Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business,” on June 26-27 in New York. The team will demo how the new Version 6.4 of its ClickFox Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) platform enables organizations to analyze data from all customer touch points and provides a roadmap of each customer's journey for increased customer satisfaction and improved revenue.

Here's why our CEO, Marco Pacelli, thinks you should swing by our booth (number 304): “Before exceptional customer experiences occur, companies must connect operational silos for an understanding of the complete customer journeys. ClickFox is working with the nation’s largest telcos and financial institutions to identify common trends across multiple departments (from the retail store to social channels to call centers) to provide executives with the holistic view needed to help them create tremendous brand value and profitability.”

Details:

What: Forrester's Customer Experience Forum 2012 East, “Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business”

Where: New York Marriott Marquis, 1535 Broadway, New York, NY [booth 304]

When: Tuesday, June 26, 2012 - Wednesday, June 27, 2012

About Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum:

Based on the case studies and analysis in Forrester's upcoming book, this Event will detail specific ways to transform your company so that you can reap the full business benefits of the customer experience revolution. This is not just the same old "focus on the customer" message. It requires a new way to manage companies, looking deep into every process and incentive to see whether it supports the overall goal: to deliver a great customer experience.

Are you planning to attend the event? We hope to see you there!

Get a Free Gartner Case Study on Sprint's VoC Program

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:00:00 -0600

We wanted to share a fantastic complimentary case study from Gartner on how Sprint's holistic voice of the customer (VoC) program helped it improve customer satisfaction, accelerating it from last place to first in several major satisfaction rankings. Gartner highlights the best practices that customer experience executives can use to improve their VoC initiatives. See why ClickFox was mentioned in the report.

Download Now!

FierceFinance Big Data (Free) Webinar is This Thursday

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

ClickFox CEO, Marco Pacelli, will be one of the hosts on this Thursday's FierceFinance Webinar, where he will be discussing how big data is reshaping financial services:

“The sheer volume of transactions, interactions and account data makes it increasingly difficult for banks to get timely insights into trends impacting business issues,” said Pacelli. “At ClickFox, we’re enabling financial services organizations to bring order to the complex maze of data that’s been collected for years, and assembling disparate pieces of transactions and interactions to draw a complete intuitive picture.”

Be sure to join us on Thursday!

When: Thursday, Feb. 16, 2012 from 2 to 3 p.m. EST

Released: White Paper by AnyPresence on Mobile Apps in Utilities

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

Shortly after we published our market brief on mobile apps for customer service and engagement (also see our infographic) we got in touch with AnyPresence which is a leading mobile platform that decreases the cost and complexity of multi-device application development, deployment, and maintenance. The platform allows non-technical users the ability to assemble and deploy HTML5, iOS, and Android apps without having to write code or install any software. Pretty cool stuff.

So when they decided to quote us in their recent (terrific) white paper on mobile apps in utilities we felt our readers would benefit from reading it too. You can download a free copy of the white paper here.

Let us know what you think in the comments?

Consumer Tipping Point Survey Results Published [Infographic]

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 00:00:00 -0600

At the end of 2011 we surveyed consumers to see what frustrates them the most when it comes to interacting with companies across various industries. This market brief presents the findings of the second annual consumer tipping points survey, which reveals what customer service issues frustrate consumers the most, and how they respond to negative experiences. We examined trends year-over-year to understand how customer expectations and perceptions are changing, and the hard-hitting impact to satisfaction, loyalty and revenue for businesses.

People Experience

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0600

CNBC recently aired a feature titled “Customer (Dis) Service”, a program that took viewers through the evolution of customer care and described the current state of customer service relationships as “wrecked, shattered and ruined”. As initiatives like automation and outsourcing were widely implemented to curb the costs of servicing customers, experience took a major hit. So where are companies most often not meeting customer needs?

Surprisingly even with the evolution of interaction channels that now include web, chat, mobile apps, social media and more, consumers still seem to value pretty basic tenets of service. ClickFox just conducted its second annual Consumer Tipping Points survey to discover the impact of poor customer experience, and the results support the network’s take: in 2010 and 2011, respondents chose “having to speak with multiple people/not getting what they wanted on the first try” and “rude or inexperienced service technicians” as the most frustrating service areas. Even in this digital age of the consumer, people still value efficient, convenient, quality service from the people delivering customer-facing support. During “Customer (Dis) Service”, CNBC pointed to a bright spot: industry leader ING credits its happy customers with happy employees who are all committed to building and deepening customer relationships. Longtime ClickFox client Sprint has seen extraordinary gains in JD Power, ACSI and internal satisfaction rankings due to an enterprise-wide focus on customer experience that extends far beyond the contact center walls to foster a culture where everyone is incented on CRM improvements. While both success stories involve focusing on the traditional ‘voice of the customer’, they also incorporate the ‘voice of the employee’, underscoring the importance of their critical role in relationships.

For organizations to truly be customer-centric, they must include employees in the process – Carl Lyon of the QoE (Quality of Experience Company), is exploring how this new ecosystem of stakeholders fits together to drive experience-focused decision-making across the enterprise and existing sources of data. Check out a video of Carl discussing an inside-out approach to tackling multi-channel challenges and the role of analytics in transforming customer experience.

Mobile Apps for Customer Service and Engagement

Wed, 07 Dec 2011 00:00:00 -0600

The explosion of mobile apps has created a huge demand from smartphone users and given organizations a fresh new revenue stream as they inform, engage, market and sell to tech-savvy consumers. Mobile apps provide a unique platform for companies to build their brands, increase customer engagement and loyalty and increase competitive advantage, but they also can serve as another customer service touch point like the web or contact center, empowering customers with convenient, on-the-go self-service features.

So how do companies today leverage this unique new touch point and create customer-centric mobile apps that drive more loyal, profitable relationships? Our survey revealed consumer perceptions about mobile apps, including frequency of usage, buying behavior, differences among device providers and likelihood to use for customer service purposes.

Click here to download the Mobile Apps for Customer Service survey results.

New CEAi Infographic: Repeat Contact Behavior and Costs

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

One of the benefits of having an interaction cloud with billions of customer behavior patterns is that we can aggregate it to find interesting stories. This infographic illustrates variations in customer behavior across the US for nationwide wireless providers – analysis revealed that customer in some states are more likely to contact their provider more than once, driving up service costs for the organization.

Do you agree with this analysis? Find the state you live in and think back about your repeat calls to your wireless provider? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.

Head over to our CEAi page to find more interesting insights and stay tuned for additional infographics in the future.

CEO’s Article on Business Insider: Marketing’s Role In The Customer Experience Ecosystem

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

ClickFox CEO, Marco Pacelli, has a new column over at Business Insider. We’ll be sure to cross-post his articles here as well. Enjoy!

Marketing’s Role In The Customer Experience Ecosystem

We’ve all done it: called a company about a product or service only to navigate through an endless voice system. Perhaps after that we fired off an email to customer service and then we got online to chat with a service representative. Then as a last resort, we hit our social media channels to blast our comments to anyone who will listen. Will a truck arrive with a smartly dressed service technician or is this just another entry into the customer service abyss?

I recently sat down with Rob Strickland, president of Strickland Consulting and former CIO of T-Mobile USA, to get his thoughts on how organizations can and should be using marketing to help drive customer satisfaction and engagement.

Marco: Do you think organizations today are missing the boat on providing a positive customer experience?

Rob: I believe customer experiences are like footprints in the sand; as fast as they are made they are quickly washed away. This results in a lack of information to determine the level of your customers’ satisfaction. Companies must learn to cement those footsteps to record which customer experiences lead to increased satisfaction, loyalty, higher campaign response rates and sales. Tracking the customer experience is especially useful when developing a marketing campaign. Companies must constantly listen to consumers– across all touch points– to analyze their behavior and respond quickly to changing needs.

Marco: Where should these organizations focus to improve customer satisfaction and the overall experience?

Rob: Today’s marketers have many approaches to measure campaign and outreach effectiveness, including Web and e-commerce analytics, market research and focus groups. However, marketers are missing deep insight into the actual behavior of consumers, which can tell them how customer response rates and buying habits are influenced by the company’s marketing initiatives. For marketing to drive customer engagement and deliver the end-to-end customer experience, it must have ongoing visibility to all experiences.

Marco: What tools should companies be using to gain visibility into these experiences?

Rob: Traditional marketing tools can provide great metrics, but often the volume of data is simply too large for consumer brands, such as telcos, banks and cable companies, to digest and see how a breakdown in one area of the business is affecting another. It’s important to look at each channel your customers use to interact with your company – Web, phone, in-store, interactive voice response (IVR), Facebook, etc. – then create a holistic marketing plan that anticipates customer frustrations and allows you to up-sell to satisfied customers.

Marco: How can organizations measure customer satisfaction?

Rob: A valuable way to measure how well your marketing resonates with customers is to look at your company’s Net Promoter Score (NPS). This straightforward metric asks customers, “How likely is it that you would recommend [your company] to a friend or colleague?” As a result, the customers are divided into three categories: promoters, passives, and detractors. Looking at your company through these groups can provide great insights on how to improve your marketing strategy.

Marco: Can organizations use satisfaction indicators like the NPS to improve the bottom line and increase profit?

Rob: The NPS goes beyond the traditional Customer Satisfaction Index because it looks at your entire customer database and not just a pre-selected group. However, the difficulty lies in tying voice of the customer metrics like satisfaction and NPS to actual business outcomes. Across the entire customer lifecycle, consumers are interacting across channels and making decisions based on those interactions. Organizations need to engage customers whenever and wherever they interact and understand the optimal times, channels and offers based on past experiences and profiles. Many organizations, including T-Mobile, are beginning to leverage advanced analytics solutions to see the influence of customer service interactions, marketing campaigns, feedback outcomes and more on buying behavior, engagement (think social media) and profitability through loyalty.

Marco: When you served as the CIO of T-Mobile, they had a very positive reputation in the mobile industry for their customer-centric approach. Can you share your experiences there?

Rob: T-Mobile is one company known for its customer-centric behavior. They gained a solid reputation in the mobile industry by looking deep into the behaviors of customers and learning from their positive or negative experiences. They leverage experience analytics software, developed by ClickFox, to gain a clear picture of its customer interactions. Those insights were used to steer customers to the most appropriate services for their needs.

Marco: What advice do you have for organizations to improve customer experiences?

Rob: CMOs and their C-suite colleagues must collaborate to adapt their organizations to the way customers behave now and redefine the traditional marketing organization. Now, more than ever, how customers enter into the ecosystem matters to both revenue and costs. Moving forward, the companies that will survive are those who react quickly and directly to customer experiences and constantly adapt their marketing to meet customers’ needs. Keeping a clear and consistent marketing message across all channels is crucial to customer satisfaction. Consumers are making decisions based on every interaction, so marketers need to engage customers at every touch point to deliver the right offer in the right channel at the right time.

Robert A. "Rob" Strickland is currently Director and President of Strickland Consulting LLC, which advises companies on how to improve efficiency, cut costs and drive revenue from a CIO perspective.

Rob serves on the advisory board of ClickFox.

Watch a playlist of videos of Rob discussing several other Customer Experience topics below:

ClickFox Joins CXPA as a Corporate Member

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

As a reflection of its recognition of the importance of customer experience management, ClickFox has joined the CXPA as a Corporate Member of the growing association.

The CXPA supports the professional development of its members and advances the field by providing research and education, establishing standards, offering networking and career opportunities, promoting the industry, and creating a better understanding of the customer experience discipline.

“ClickFox has been a pioneer in the field of customer experience by recognizing the critical importance of focusing on the complete journeys of consumers across a growing multitude of interaction channels,” said Marco Pacelli, CEO of ClickFox. “Analyzing customer behavior for over 400 million consumer accounts nationwide across retail stores, web sites, contact centers, email, chat, mobile applications and social media has given us powerful insight into the most critical issues impacting satisfaction, retention and profitability in today's enterprise. The CXPA will provide us with the opportunity to be part of a unified, informed, and collective voice to help guide the evolution of customer experience.”

ClickFox will be attending the CXPA Members Insight Exchange which is the association’s first members meeting this week. Members will join together to learn from and share their knowledge and experiences with other customer experience professionals who are equally passionate about the industry. The exchange will focus on educational sessions and networking with peers and industry leaders in the customer experience field.

Governed by a Board of Directors drawn from its membership, the CXPA is led by Bruce Temkin, co-founder and chair, and Jeanne Bliss, co-founder and vice chair – pioneers in the customer experience field who have a deep understanding of the roots of this burgeoning industry and a keen shared vision of its future.

“We greatly appreciate the commitment that ClickFox is making to the Customer Experience Professionals Association as demonstrated by being a Corporate Member,” said Temkin. “We are pleased to welcome ClickFox to the CXPA, and look forward to closely working together to help create a vibrant future for customer experience management.”

Watch a replay of a webinar with Bruce Temkin here:

The VoC Hoax (follow up post)

Mon, 03 Oct 2011 00:00:00 -0500

It's been a few months since our previous post about voice of the customer programs being inadequate indicators of customer experience in general and customer satisfaction in particular. Recently we came up with some additional data about this topic that we thought would be important to share with our readers.

During a recent analysis for one of our large customers who is adamant on using VoC programs to gauge customer satisfaction we found some amazing findings. The first thing we noticed was that their post-call surveys were getting a paltry 1/4% completion rate. Yes, you read that right: one quarter of one percent of customers presented with the survey actually completed it out of millions of monthly calls. How is that a significant representation of the entire customer base? How much money has been spent trying to gather this utterly useless information?

Even though this was not part of our engagement we decided to step in and take charge of the situation. We took the survey data and we did two things with it:

We looked at the entire experience leading to the survey. Not just the last touch, which is what VoC programs usually measure, but rather every interaction across all touchpoints that led to this final event. Even though the survey questions were geared toward the agent-to-customer interaction, we wanted to see if there were any upstream events that lead to this interaction in the first place and we found a lot of breakdowns in the complete experience. The agents in the call center were not to blame for the poor satisfaction scores because they had been fully optimized. They knew the scripts and products and could answer any question. But the interactions leading to the agent experience were usually the culprit.
We took the experience journeys of the few customers who did respond to the survey and matched them with the entire customer base of tens of millions of other customers. And guess what we found? There were a lot more customers with the same kinds of experiences who did not fill out surveys. But they were heading down the same path as some of the unsatisfied customers who did fill out the surveys. We even went a step further and analyzed historical data to see how many of these customers had churned and found that many of them did.

Presenting these findings to our customer got us the attention of senior executives. For a company that is focused on customer experience, they were completely blinded by the VoC hoax. The promise of being able to better understand customers by bombarding them with feedback buttons, emails and post call surveys was not showing them the true picture. Our findings caused some internal friction because all the money spent on these technologies and efforts in the past had not generated valuable results. But everyone quickly understood that the only way to truly gain value from VoC programs was to look at all the data from all interactions. And the industry is starting to understand this as well. Just look at the M&A activity around EFM (Enterprise Feedback Management) in the past few months (which isn't really going to solve the problem).

How are you using VoC to understand the complete customer experience? We'd love to hear about it in the comments.

ClickFox and Teradata Announce Partnership

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

ClickFox, the defining leader in a new breed of experience analytics, today announced a technology partnership with Teradata Corporation (NYSE: TDC), the world’s leading analytic data solutions company focused on Integrated Data Warehousing, Big Data Analytics, and Business Applications. The complementary technologies of ClickFox customer experience analytics and Teradata analytic data solutions will enable more users across the enterprise to benefit from near real-time intelligent data and sophisticated insights.

The partnership will focus on the expansion of both traditional customer data from call centers and interactive voice response (IVR) systems and new data sources like social media, mobile applications, and e-commerce; areas that have become critical to understanding consumer behavior and perceptions. ClickFox’s unique ability to leverage data from any source, structured or unstructured, for customer interactions across channels to existing BI and analytics application insights, offers businesses a powerful enterprise-wide view of critical trends, correlations and outcomes.

Marco Pacelli, chief executive officer of ClickFox, stated, “Teradata recognizes the tremendous value of providing cross-channel customer and product experience analysis of data to its customers. Now Teradata customers will gain an even greater competitive edge with our next-generation analytics platform that will allow them to improve loyalty, raise revenue, cut costs, enhance reputation, drive business strategy and predict future needs – all with breakthrough speed and scalability.”

ClickFox will be a sponsor at the 2011 Teradata PARTNERS User Group Conference & Expo, in San Diego, CA from October 2-6. Stop by Booth 231 in the Expo Hall to learn more about the power behind ClickFox and Teradata’s advanced data analytics solutions.

Do you use mobile apps? Answer our survey for a chance to win an iPad2!

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

Mobile applications are slowly taking over our lives. To understand how consumers are using apps for customer service, we'd like you to participate in a survey that we're conducting. We're trying to understand usage, preferences and perceptions of mobile applications for customer service and engagement.

Take our 2-minute survey and we'll enter you in a drawing for a chance to win an iPad 2! We're going to give away an additional iPad2 for every 500 respondents so please share this survey with everyone you think would be interested. Click the logos to share on Facebook and Twitter:

As a survey participant, you’ll also receive a preview of the survey findings before they are published. Our previous surveys have had very interesting results about customer tipping points, interaction preferences, social CRM and more.

CEO’s Article on Business Insider: “What is Customer Satisfaction—Really?”

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0500

ClickFox CEO, Marco Pacelli, has a new column over at Business Insider. We’ll be sure to cross-post his articles here as well. Enjoy!

“What is Customer Satisfaction—Really?”

High customer satisfaction translates to customer loyalty, and loyalty is one of the biggest drivers of corporate growth. Let’s face it – customer satisfaction is at an all-time low in our country. So, what exactly is going on?

For one thing, in responding to customers’ needs, companies often rely too heavily on their customer surveys in which only a small percentage of consumers participate. In addition, even high CSAT scores do not necessarily translate directly into customer loyalty and profitability. Despite these facts, over three fourths of customer service organizations rely exclusively on CSAT scores to understand their customers’ experiences, according to a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. Certainly, surveys can offer valuable information, but they’re only a tiny piece of the overall puzzle. Customer expectations of in-store, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) and online systems that deliver services and products are very high, and we all know where ignoring the bigger picture leads.

As we’ve seen, when a company fails to meet customers’ expectations, they take action. Consumers cancel cable services, they switch cell phone providers, they change banks, and they refuse to book a flight on the airlines that lost their luggage. They also share their experiences and not through surveys. Instead, they tweet, they chat, they blog, they assign ratings, and they make recommendations and give warnings. In short, many more customers are sharing their opinions and their preferences with their virtual next door neighbors—thousands of like-minded friends—in real time. Word-of-mouth has assumed an additional dimension. The more humorous and the bigger the rants, the more people are likely to read, watch and listen.

To understand customers—what customers are doing and what they’re saying—companies need to examine the customers’ interactions with their products and services through a different lens and discover where these are falling short. Fortunately, the “know your customer” adage has been taken to an entirely new level by experience analytics platform providers. In fact, Forrester has said that an experience platform ClickFox offers provides the unique capability to “identify discrepancies between system design and actual interactions across multiple channels to provide meaningful insight.” Tracking actual customer behaviors and experiences across retail, online and contact centers provides powerful insights into the root cause of issues like poor satisfaction. Fast growing, successful companies retain and gain customer loyalty by doing more than simply resolving an existing problem. They avert common downstream issues by being proactive.

To be proactive, companies must gain insights into their customers that reach far beyond survey data. Here, a comprehensive view of the customer experience from beginning to end with the opportunity to drill down to understand specific interactions becomes extremely valuable. By identifying repeated patterns, complaints and areas for improvement, companies can focus on and remove the greatest obstacles to the consumer, reduce repeat calls over the same issue, and avert future problems. Companies have the opportunity to understand customer behavior and improve satisfaction rates. This leads to greater customer retention and company growth so that companies can rely on the strongest marketing engine that exists: the customer.