In today's complex customer interaction environment, it's becoming increasingly more difficult to navigate through the corporate data jungle in order to find what you're really looking for. While companies have been constantly investing in customer interaction touch-points, they have neglected to truly understand their customers' needs. Companies have taken the seemingly easy route of analyzing customer interactions in silos and using BI tools to generate limited insight, rather than focusing on cross-channel customer behavior patterns, customer tendencies and the ability to understand customer intent.
There is a growing problem in the information marketplace where enterprises have a lot of data, but they lack the ability to extract the right information from this data in order to make smart, timely decisions. In a recent survey, a leading industry research firm found that over 40 percent of enterprise IT decision makers use three to five BI solutions on a regular basis. What is the cause of all this confusion? Do we have too much data and no easy way to organize it? Do we have the right tools for the job?
A new breed of tools has emerged to address this issue. Instead of focusing on data collected from various systems, Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) solutions focus on the customer. These new solutions go beyond the capabilities of traditional BI tools and allow companies to understand the real motivations of their customers, enabling them to make more informed and timely business decisions. Instead of gathering data and then trying to figure out what to look for, CEA tools aggregate behavior patterns and present them to the analyst in a visual way.
Here are five ways that Customer Experience Analytics can help companies overcome the shortcomings of their BI solutions:
- CEA solutions point you to the problem areas for further investigation.
CEA solutions look for data patterns based on actual customer actions and find the issues they encounter. Rather than sift through mountains of data looking for problems, dominant paths are automatically extracted and compared to the ideal path that you want your customers to follow. Instead of trying to figure out what to look for, analysts can start from this point and dig deeper into the root cause of these issues by slicing up the behavior patterns based on segmentation information, historical behavior patterns, satisfaction scores or any other metadata that is available. - CEA solutions track customer behavior paths and show you what happened and why.
Old Excel sheets and pivot tables have been replaced with wizards and fancy dashboards. BI tools are great at counting how much of something happened by organizing the information in an easy-to-digest application. But in the end these tools only answer simple questions like: How many times did customers call your contact center? How many product returns occurred at your retail point of sale?
Understanding exactly what happened and why customers behaved the way they did is crucial to the enterprise. This can affect several departments and impact operations, sales, marketing and customer service. CEA solutions can scan a broad range of customer interactions, but also allow you to narrow down your research and focus on specific events to understand them better and help you improve the overall customer experience. The ability to see how interaction channels are impacting each other and what specific events trigger cross-channel customer transitions are becoming a must-have for today's organizations. Without this unique capability that CEA delivers, companies must rely on traditional BI tools that keep them in the dark. - CEA solutions can ingest data from any system and any format.
Traditional BI tools aren't able to gather the right information from different data sources, in different formats, link them all together and deliver a simple query interface to the end user. But this is what CEA systems were built to do.
CEA solutions were designed to ingest any kind of data that the organization may already be collecting. There is no integration required, so any platform and any format can be analyzed. This opens the door to analysis of data that has never been used before in cross-channel analytics, such as statistics from speech-enabled IVR systems, handheld device information, retail interaction data and many other sources. Data can be extracted from existing structured databases or parsed from unstructured file formats. And since these internal system files are already being generated by most systems, it's just a matter of pointing them to the right repository and using them correctly. - CEA solutions bring the customer experience to the forefront of the enterprise.
A well-designed CEA solution can be used by every department that is impacted by the analyzed systems. In a customer-centric organization everyone can benefit from a better understanding of the customer experience. From different business units to the contact center, to marketing, finance, operations, product management, or even research and development – CEA can help propel the enterprise to a much higher level of understanding of actual customer needs. Rather than just focusing on the data in a BI tool, analyzing customer behavior patterns with CEA can open the door to achieving better customer satisfaction, lower levels of customer churn, increased operational efficiency and innovation. - CEA solutions can complement traditional BI tools.
Although the shortcomings of BI tools mentioned above can be easily overcome by using new CEA solutions, this does not mean that the time and money invested in BI has gone to waste. On the contrary, a well-designed BI solution with a powerful schema can be used as one of the data feeds into a new CEA system. By combining the capabilities of both systems, working in unison, results will be achieved much faster and with greater ease.
Amir Dekel is director of Marketing Communications for ClickFox – the pioneering leader of Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) software and solutions. Mr. Dekel is responsible for the company's communications plan, product marketing and social media initiatives. Prior to joining ClickFox, Amir was a senior sales engineer at NICE Systems, Inc., where he was responsible for sales support of interaction analytics solutions and call recording platforms for the financial industry.
Amir has a BA in Business Management from the College of Business, in Israel and an MBA from the Stern School of Management at New York University.
October 1, 1:00 Eastern: Strategies for Integrating Non-Voice Channels to Ensure a Consistent and Improved Customer Experience. Presented by Genesys. During this webcast we will discuss how businesses will more effectively engage their customers to meet growth and customer satisfaction objectives by understanding the following issues: --What benefits cross-channel conversations will have in improving the customer experience--An overview of ways to ensure a consistent experience across not just the phone, but also the newer popular web and mobile channels.
October 8, 1:00 Eastern: From Agent Performance to Business Optimization. Presented by NICE. A new business centric approach to quality management links the strategic objectives of the business with the quality management process. It uses the quality cycle of problem identification, root cause analysis, corrective action, and continued monitoring to drive continued business improvement. Join this webcast to learn how you can take the next step in quality management evolution towards true business optimization.
October 13, 1:00 Eastern: Extending Workforce Management into Back Office. Presented by NICE. For most corporations, back offices handle the communications and fulfillment activities that keep businesses running smoothly and efficiently. However, many companies lack the WFM tools and data collection capabilities to do effective WFM. In this session, you will learn how companies are extending the use of their contact center workforce management systems into the back office.
October 15, 1:00 Eastern: Optimizing Agent Performance Through Analytics. Presented by Enkata. An agent's performance has a direct effect on a customer's experience. A new approach, that is analytics based, can provide the tools to effectively evaluate key agent performance metrics, deliver targeted and personalized training efficiently, enable agents to self-asses and self-correct, and ultimately shift the evaluation of performance from an efficiency focus, to one that is more about effectiveness.
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