ClickFox Teams with Next IT for New Avatar Offering
Today ClickFox, a provider of customer experience analytics (CEA) software and solutions, and Next IT, a company that uses natural language as well as self-service for businesses and organizations, announced a partnership they hope will improve customer experience.
Next IT's flagship product, ActiveAgent, uses Human Emulation Software to create virtual experts that enable organizations like Continental Airlines, Shaw Communications, and the U.S. Army to deliver information to customers with interactive conversation across multiple service channels, such as the Web, contact center, intranet, and mobile devices. ClickFox's CEA tracks customer behavior and outcomes for the nation's largest telecom, financial services, insurance, and utility organizations across all interaction channels, revealing the true impact of service on operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and retention. Together, the two companies represent a departure from traditional customer service approaches that focus more on business and operational goals as opposed to actual customer needs and expectations.
Next IT will use ClickFox's CEA to understand how customers interact with Virtual Experts, to optimize Virtual Expert performance and measure the overall user experience.
Jeff Brown, executive vice president of sales and marketing at Next IT, says his company's ActiveAgents will be greatly improved by using ClickFox’s analytics. “Our technology is able to be trained across many different verticals, which match up very well with ClickFox’s,” he states.
John Pasqualetto, vice president of business development at ClickFox, says the partnership will yield positive benefits for his company as well. “We believe that companies are moving in this direction—to want to be able to be much more proactive about how they handle their customers," he says. "They want to be much smarter; they want to have the best and the most cost-effective solutions.”
The two companies also hope to gain the most from the use of multiple channels. “The trend is certainly going to multichannel. The trends are going to mobile devices; customers want to be able to interface with their providers how they want, when they want, so just like any other human, when we’re having conversations, some of us like to talk over the phone, some of us like to go to the Web, some of us like to send SMS texts because we don’t want to be on the phone, we have a preference in how we want to communicate and when we want to communicate,” Brown explains.
Pasqualetto also contended that his company wants to minimize customer interactions by anticipating customer needs and that Next IT will be a part of that since ClickFox can provide CEA. “If [customers] have chosen to interact with the virtual agent, Next IT is prepared to give them information that may minimize their entire need to interact, much in the way it's minimizing agent calls it may minimize the entire interaction, making the customer much more self-sufficient.”