When people talk about the customer experience and customer satisfaction, they should be referring to the complete picture, from the moment a customer first enters a retail outlet or online market, not merely the contact with a call center agent or IVR system. Certainly, contact center activity is critical, but it’s also directly related to other previous engagements, and that’s what businesses need to be able to understand in order to truly understand the customer experience.

 

ClickFox has taken that to heart, and is providing Customer Behavior Intelligence (CBI) solutions to businesses, allowing its customers to identify and analyze the complete customer experience.

 

“It’s a system to create a cradle to grave view of the customer experience, from entry to exit, from point of sale to what drove the customer to the help desk,” explained ClickFox’s (News - Alert) John Pasqualetto recently.

 

Certainly, it’s useful to understand how customers view their call center experiences, but considerably greater benefit can be had by being able to identify which products drive those customers to the call center. ClickFox lets businesses understand what works and what doesn’t — from the product line to the IVR platform to the agents themselves.

 

In fact, ClickFox provides the ability to analyze customer behavior on any interactive platform: IVR, speech recognition, Internet sites, kiosks, and CRM and other enterprise applications. Regardless of the point of contact, ClickFox helps businesses relate each individual customer experience to that customer’s total experience.

 

The key, as Pasqualetto explained, is the “sessionization” of data, and the ability to link that sessionization to create a holistic view of customer behavior.

 

“We take data, sessionize it, and draw value from it by determining how Web hits, IVR calls, and agent calls are related,” he added. “It’s about adding experience and value to metrics.”

 

What does that mean? It’s common knowledge that high IVR usage rates are considered positive, since they reduce dependence on agents (i.e., high IVR rates are a way to reduce payroll). But, high IVR rates themselves are hardly enough. The key lies in the ability to understand whether those incidences were successful in giving customers the resolutions they were looking for.

 

Contact centers often talk about first call resolution — ClickFox prefers first contact resolution, since it’s premise is that customer satisfaction in not driven only by calls — but in order to determine the success rate of first contacts, businesses must first be able to identify the first contact.

 

That’s where ClickFox’s solution fits in. It brings not only the call center experience into the equation, but also adds any and all other points of contact a customer may have had, starting with the point of sale in a store or the first click on a Web site.

 

By doing so, it enable businesses to use information about customer behavior to proactively make changes to enhance the overall experience of dealing with the company. 

 

The ultimate goal, of course, is to achieve 100% first contact satisfaction, which would mean no calls to the contact center — but that simply isn’t realistic. And because a variety of factors play into the customer experience outside of the product itself — like technology and human behavior — there is always the possibility of a less than satisfactory experience even at the call center level.

 

Recent research, in fact, indicates this is more than a possibility: Less than half of North Americans are satisfied with their contact center experiences. That’s not a good sign — but it’s where ClickFox comes into play.

 

With the ClickFox solution, businesses are able to combine information from various points of contact — IVR, agents, live online help desks, email-based service centers, and even in-store customer service desks — to identify those customers most in need of attention. 

 

Just as it is important to identify agents that need additional training, it is important to identify multi-callers and those with previous negative experiences. With that knowledge, those customers can be quickly routed to the most appropriate place to resolve issues and avoid further dissatisfaction.  In fact, if a problem is resolved quickly after a poor initial contact, customers often recognize the difference in contacts, and it’s their nature to recall the most recent contact — that which resolved their issues.

 

The ability to consolidate data and use it to enhance the overall customer experience is what ClickFox calls “active business intelligence.” The communications world has a heavy focus on personalization of services today, and this is a way for contact centers to personalize their services to individual customers, resulting in greater customer satisfaction, which ultimately drives revenue.

 

In order to simplify deployment of its experience analytics system, and to extend its capabilities into as many business communications environments as possible, ClickFox recently announced partnerships with Talisma and Intervoice, to go along with previous relationships with Genesys, Avaya, and Nuance, and many others.

 

With these relationships in place, ClickFox is further extending its services to a range of businesses, enabling them to take action and maintain control of their customers’ experiences.