UPDATED 10:25 EDT / JUNE 24 2011

Poor Customer Service Is Lose-Lose All Around

When a consumer has a poor customer service experience – be it by phone or the web — everybody loses.

“Not only does it hurt consumers, but companies who cross the line get buried in an avalanche of negative opinions, and that brand hit can take years to recover,” writes Marco Pacelli in a recent column.

Even companies that have “good” customer service are leaving potential money on the table by not doing better, Pacelli said.

“There are so many lost opportunities for companies who are fine, or even good, at customer service, to be great,” writes Pacelli. “They need to understand the impact of customer behavior and interactions on critical business drivers like attrition, profitability and loyalty.”

Pacelli is Founder and CEO at Clickfox. The Atlanta-based company specializes in customer experience analytics software, which helps companies get a complete picture of how its customers interact with them.

Traditionally, companies analyze customer behavior in silos, according to Pacelli. One group might analyze call center operations, while another looks for patterns in online chat activity. The problem is most companies don’t marry this siloed data to get a complete view of the customer experience and, hence, overlook key problem areas.

And the problem is only getting bigger, as data volumes continue to explode due to social media and event-driven data – commonly called Big Data.

It is critical to understand the complete customer experience because “there is a high correlation between customer service and customer loyalty,” Pacelli writes. “These frustrations not only impact our mood and general opinion of the brand, they also have a profound impact on the company and its bottom line.”

Writes Pacelli:

While most organizations know when they aren’t doing a great job of servicing customers, and are even working to make improvements, almost none are actually analyzing the direct impact of customer interactions and service experiences on actual business outcomes. They understand that they need to address low customer satisfaction scores, but they typically don’t have insight into what events and behaviors drive dissatisfaction. They need to take a holistic view of their customers as individuals, not split personalities as seen through the silos of different data centers, depending on whether the interaction was online or over the phone.

Clickfox, which recently beefed up its sales team with industry vets from Oracle, IBM, SAP and Salesforce.com, aims to simplify the process of bringing together disparate customer experience data wherever it resides. The Software-as-a-Service platform allows users to drill-down into the nitty-gritty details of customer experiences, but also includes high-level dashboards so that executives can view how the company’s customer service is performing as a whole.

You can check out Pacelli’s full column here. And below are two interviews with Pacelli via theCube. Here, Pacelli and Dave Vellante, Wikibon’s Chief Analyst, cover Clickfox’s unique capabilities and the broad spectrum of customers across many industries that are looking at taking advantage of its solutions. In the video below, Pacelli talks to SiliconANGLE Founder John Furrier about what led him to customer experience analytics.


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