2015 Temkin Group CX Vendor Excellence Award Winners

Today we announced the results of the 2015 Temkin Group CX Vendor Excellence Awards. Once again we had a great group of nominees, making the scoring difficult for the judges. Congratulations to this year’s winners:

Confirmit
Clarabridge
NICE Systems
Qualtrics
Rant & Rave
ResponseTek
Walker

In its third year, these awards recognize companies that provide products and services that help companies improve the customer experience they deliver. Nominees are rated based on their capabilities, results, and client feedback.

The CxVE Awards were judged by five noted customer experience experts: Mila D’Antonio (Editor-in-Chief at 1to1 Media), Desirree Madison-Biggs (Customer Experience/NPS Programs Director at Airbnb.), Rick Meyreles (VP – Global Voice of Customer, World Service at American Express), Jen Rodstrom (CX Transformist at Temkin Group), and Bruce Temkin (Managing Partner & CX Transformist at Temkin Group).

“This year’s crop of candidates was quite competitive. With growing capabilities aimed at improving their clients’ customer experience, thoughtful strategies focused on long-term growth, and exciting road maps that promise innovative enhancements and product launches in the coming months, the vendors that participated in the Temkin Group Customer Experience Vendor Excellence Awards prove that customer experience excellence is at the forefront of technology design.” – Mila D’Antonio

Watch this blog and my Twitter feed for an announcement about the 2016 CX Vendor Excellence Awards in January 2016.

I’ve included the first two section of the nomination forms submitted by the seven winners.

Temkin Group is not responsible for the accuracy of this content. This information is directly from the submissions provided by the vendors; the only changes made were to create consistent formatting and to remove graphics.

Clarabridge

1) Company Overview:

Clarabridge’s customer experience management platform helps hundreds of the world’s leading brands understand and improve the customer journey. Powered by the industry’s most sophisticated text analytics engine, Clarabridge collects and transforms all forms of customer feedback into intelligence, allowing businesses to activate the voice of the customer across the enterprise. The result: happy, loyal customers. For more information, visit www.clarabridge.com.

2) Make the case:

Winning brands win the hearts of their customers. They make them feel valued, inspire their loyalty, and earn their business. This relationship gives companies a competitive edge. Clarabridge empowers brands to win the hearts of their customers by providing a meaningful understanding of the customer’s wants and needs.This deep, accurate understanding of customer needs, wants and emotions is the key differentiator for successful businesses in today’s “age of the customer.” It empowers customer champions, informs successful marketing activities, drives process and product improvements, and ultimately improves customer loyalty and the bottom line.

Clarabridge gets to the heart of customer feedback by providing the world’s most sophisticated customer intelligence platform.

• Clarabridge connects to all sources of customer feedback, including ratings and reviews, chat, both Clarabridge-generated and third-party surveys, blogs and forums, emails, call centers, social media, and voice recordings. Clarabridge is the only platform that can easily connect to all sources of customer feedback and analyze it in aggregate.
• Clarabridge uses industry-specific models and the most precise, accurate Natural Language Processing (NLP) functionality and sentiment analysis to detect emotion, context, and root causes, as well as to predict future customer behaviors.
• Our services team has helped with over 1,000 customer experience management initiatives. We help businesses mature their program over time with expert consulting services.
• Clarabridge gives an organization’s employees customer feedback tools that alert them to problems, help them route and track issues, and allow them to make the right decisions to continuously improve customer experience

Confirmit

1) Company Overview:

Confirmit enables businesses to operationalize feedback and drive change throughout their organizations using the world’s most secure, reliable and scalable solutions for Voice of the Customer (VoC), Employee Engagement and Market Research (MR) programs. We work with global 5,000 clients to create multi-channel, multi-lingual feedback and research programs that engage customers, empower employees, deliver a compelling respondent experience, and provide high Return on Investment. With the power to listen to the Voice of the Customer, integrate it with business data to generate powerful insight, and take action, we deliver effective business change and create a competitive advantage for clients.

2) Make the Case:

Confirmit’s mission: An unwavering commitment to ensure clients gain richer insights from their data that drive smarter business decisions. Confirmit’s commitment to fostering innovation is nothing new. For close to 20 years, we have focused on delivering innovative, reliable technology (with 100 percent uptime in 2014), building outstanding client relationships, and creating a community to share knowledge with industry thought leaders.

Confirmit’s 5-strong global VoC team not only works directly with customers, but is are utterly committed to furthering the status of our profession and the effectiveness of CX through thought leadership and the development of best practices. We speak, blog, write industry articles, consult with clients and develop methodologies and documentation to improve our client’s VoC/CX practices.

We want companies to believe they can be VoC heroes. We believe the most successful VoC programs leverage data from a variety of channels to enable decision makers to analyze feedback and track trends on a variety of devices. We not only want to provide clients with the best technology in order to make them VoC heroes, but give them consulting support when they need it, based on the Confirmit Voices methodology which was launched in 2011, a flexible model which can be customized to each client’s business needs. Our consultants have helped customers to achieve successes such as: Recommendation rate driven to 94 percent, 30+ percent increase in NPS®, 90 percent renewal rate, and 96 percent low or very low Customer Effort Score.

We also give customers a place to discuss customer experience trends, best practices, and love to recognize them for their hard work. The Confirmit Community Conferences held in Orlando, San Francisco, Oslo and London last year brought together industry leaders and heroes from ViaSat Inc., Best Buy, Infor, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, Ciena Corporation and more to share stories of epic battles and successes from their missions to initiate transformative change and escalate business results.

Additionally, 43 industry leading organizations earned 2014 Confirmit ACE Awards. 40 key decision makers from 22 ACE Award winning companies, including ADT Security Services, Canon USA, Inc. and Harvard Business Publishing, were honored at the conferences 2014.

Successful VoC programs need strong text analytics solutions. This last year was a major step forward for Confirmit, beginning with the acquisition of Integrasco, a leader in social intelligence and text analytics. This milestone brings advanced technologies for capturing social insights and analyzing unstructured text into the Confirmit portfolio of software offerings. This ensures that Confirmit’s clients can manage, analyze and react to the huge volume of unstructured data from customers and integrate it with their more formal VoC data to create new insight.

Since the Integrasco acquisition, we have launched Confirmit Genius™, a text and social analytics solution that provides categorization and sentiment analysis for free-form text. 3.5 billion posts were collected through Confirmit Genius for analysis from social media platforms, forums, blogs and news media, at an average rate of over 10 million posts per day in 2014.

We brought the industry’s first customer engagement hub to market. The 2014 launch of Horizons Version 18 introduced Confirmit SmartHubTM, the industry’s first customer engagement hub that enables businesses to capture, analyze and respond to customer and market feedback across multiple channels and sources in real-time. Instant Analytics is a new, powerful analysis module that provides immediate, actionable insights with no setup or training required. In addition, the new Active DashboardsTM module provides enhanced data visualization to enable stakeholders to analyze information and track trends immediately on a variety of devices. Horizons V18 also added a new Action Management module to ensure businesses can automatically trigger actions, based on up-to-date customer, employee or market information. Cases can now be managed through to completion to ensure businesses drive change and close the loop on tactical and strategic actions.

The launch was followed by the introduction of Confirmit Horizons Version 18.5 in Q4 2014 as the result of multiple product enhancements created through the recently-adopted continuous deployment process.

“Confirmit has once more managed to produce a remarkable new version of Horizons. SmartHub is a powerful innovation that allows us, for the first time, to easily capture and map all customer data from various touchpoints in the customer journey, into one intelligent hub which has generated new insights and initiated tactical and strategic actions to drive our business performance improvements.” – Sam Otter, Head of Marketing, Virgin Holidays

NICE Systems

1) Company Overview:

NICE SYSTEMS (NASDAQ: NICE) is the worldwide leader of software solutions that deliver strategic insights by capturing and analyzing mass quantities of structured and unstructured data in real time from multiple sources, including, phone calls, mobile apps, emails, chat, social media, and video. NICE solutions enable organizations to take the Next-Best-Action to improve customer experience and business results, ensure compliance, fight financial crime, and safeguard people and assets. NICE solutions are used by over 25,000 organizations in more than 150 countries, including over 80 of the Fortune 100 companies.

2) Make the Case:

In the “age of the customer” organizations heavily invest in improving their customer experience. In today’s Omni channel world, companies often struggle to deliver a seamless customer experience. This is because as customers navigate the different channels to solve for a specific query (such as web, mobile, IVR, chat, voice, etc.,) they expect companies to have a connected view of these different channel interactions, but organizations aren’t always equipped to do this, and as a consequence, they are often challenged to understand customer needs at any point in time. In order to do so, they need to map the complete customer journey of this sequence of events, and then gather insights and identify business issues that require proactive action, such as churn or defection mitigation, process inefficiency and service dissatisfaction.

NICE Systems developed a suite of customer experience analytics solutions that are focused on enhancing and improving organizations’ ability to impact the customer experience throughout the journey. All solutions are utilizing Big Data infrastructure, analyze interactions and transactions (structured and unstructured data) and are capable of generating insights and trigger corrective actions, also in real-time.

In the crowded market of analytics solutions, NICE unique value is its ability to provide a complete suite of solutions that can cater to different industry verticals and can address complex scenarios and unlimited amount of channels and data points. Gaining from decades of leading the contact center and analytics market, NICE is well positioned to help organizations not only uncover hidden insights and trends from structured and unstructured data, but also to close the loop and drive the next best action that yield better business results and an improved customer experience. There are several specific solutions that we would like to make a case for this award. These are:

• Customer Journey Optimization
• Real Time Web Engage
• Fizzback

Customers often start a task in one channel and complete it in another, creating a complex journey across multiple channels. While undertaking their journey your customers want you to understand and meet their needs quickly and efficiently.

NICE Customer Journey Optimization is an analytics solution that helps organizations manage the customer engagement process across multiple touch points in real or near-real time. It analyzes structured and unstructured data from multiple communication channels, and generates a visual representation of customer behaviors and trends. Using the analytics derived from the customer journey, organizations are able to focus on those business issues that matter the most to their customers and optimize these engagements.

Customer Journey Optimization Unique Features

• The ability to visualize the customer journey and analyze both high-level trends, as well as journey information pertinent to the individual customer, identify root-cause and making sure that customer experience optimization is at the core of every action.
• Being able to assign relevant contact reason to each engagement and as a result predict customer next action, reducing customer effort and driving service excellen
• The ability to provide real-time guidance based on the customer journey transactions and interactions and address personalized customer needs, improving customer loyalty.

The NICE Real-Time Web Engage solution helps leading banks, hospitality, digital media, content providers, travel and entertainment companies create meaningful customer experiences on their websites. This solution harnesses Big Data gathered from customer interactions, across all touch-points, and give every customer the kind of personalized web experience that best matches its needs. This is done by making personalized offers specific to each individual based on their entire customer journey as well as their profile and recent activity.

Real-Time Web Unique Features

NICE Real-Time Web leverages proprietary technologies that offer ground-breaking capabilities in terms of personalized customer service.

• ‘Identity Graph’ is a patent-pending customer resolution algorithm that automatically
• ‘stiches’ together customer’s anonymous and authenticated identifiers across multiple channels, including web cookies, e-mails and other account ID This technology enables the creation of a complete customer journeys across multiple touch points.
• Advanced predictive analytics uses machine learning algorithms to convert granular customer interactions into behaviors, determining customer intent and identifying product interest, life cycle stage or likelihood to churn.
• Cross channel decision engine takes all the Big Data information and define how customer propensity score maps to service and marketing offers across different channel It provides real-time recommendations for next best action/offer and help drive action.

Fizzback is a leading Voice of the Customer (VoC) solution, delivering value ranging from reducing churn and increasing customer loyalty to improving operational efficiency. Leading global organizations in variety of industries use Fizzback to deliver a better experience to their customers, while enjoying an increase in employee motivation. Fizzback engages with customers across all channels, including SMS mobile apps, email, online and IVR, ensuring the most effective VoC analysis. Fizzback solicits both structured and unstructured real-time feedback at each touch point along the customer’s journey.

Fizzback Unique Features

When you reach out to your customers for feedback, they can respond in many ways – or not at all. In order to make sure you’re getting the most out of Voice of the Customer (VoC) initiatives, you need to both engage your customers and effectively interpret their response.

• Collecting feedback via the customer’s preferred channel reaching an average of between 25-50% response rate
• Customers using certain channels respond to Fizzback polls in less than 20 minutes, ensuring the business can react quickly.
• Fizzback’s responsiveness and scalability ensures consistency of information and customer tracking from touchpoint to touchpoint.
• Fizzback significantly improves employee engagement by providing detailed and objective customer satisfaction metrics to optimize KPIs for any team, agent or store.

Qualtrics

1) Company Overview:

Qualtrics is a rapidly growing software-as-a-service company and the provider of the world’s leading insight platform. More than 7,000 enterprises worldwide, including half of the Fortune 100 and 99 of the top 100 business schools rely on Qualtrics technology. Our solutions make it fast and easy to capture customer, employee, and market insights in one place. These insights help our clients make informed, data-driven business decisions. Global enterprises, academic institutions, and government agencies use Qualtrics to collect, analyze, and act on voice of the customer, customer satisfaction, Net Promoter Score, employee engagement, 360-degree feedback, market, product concept, and employee feedback.

2) Make the Case:

At Qualtrics, we take pride in customer obsession. It’s the first trait we look for when hiring and it’s ingrained in our company culture. Our mission to provide customers with the best insights possible empowers each of our employees, regardless of their role in the company, to continually think of new ways to improve the customer experience.

While this customer-focused philosophy is evident in our work culture, it’s also at the core of each of our products. Qualtrics believes that improving customer experience begins with capturing the right customer and employee insights to make immediate, specific changes that will ultimately help retain and delight customers. Qualtrics products allow organizations of all sizes to gather data faster and easier than ever before. With real-time customer and employee insights, organizations can make smart, data-driven decisions that have a measurable, immediate impact on the customer experience.

The Qualtrics platform includes the following solutions:

• Qualtrics Vocalize is the industry’s first out-of-the-box voice of the customer platform. Vocalize takes feedback from multiple sources, multiple touch-points, and multiple points in time (relational, transactional, and unsolicited customer comments on social media and online reviews) and rolls them into a single interactive, actionable communication and closed loop system. With flexible dashboards, dynamic case management, and open architecture and scalability, Vocalize provides organizations the power to configure and evolve every part of their voice of the customer program. This powerful out-of-the-box VoC solution sets us apart from our competition.
• Qualtrics Research Suite is a survey-based insight platform that can be used for hundreds of different research initiatives, across nearly every functional department within an organization. Enterprises, government agencies and DIY researchers all rely on Qualtrics to be more competitive, efficient, profitable 
and ultimately—to be right. Whether it’s an NPS, voice of the customer, or customer satisfaction survey, Research Suite makes it easy for any organization, big or small, to collect and analyze the customer insights they need in real-time to make the right data-driven decisions without the expense or hassle of programming.
• Qualtrics Mobile extends the features and benefits of Qualtrics Research Suite to smartphones and tablets, giving organizations the ability to capture in-the-moment customer experience feedback anytime, anywhere; online, offline or via SMS.
• Qualtrics Site Intercept is all about capturing value from website visitors through targeted, engaging messages. The solution empowers marketers and researchers to understand the “whys” behind website visitor behavior and collect valuable data about the customer via targeted online content—all in real-time without relying on IT. Site Intercept provides the tools and ability to get the right message in front of the right visitors to access hard-to-reach insights. This ability to engage visitors enables companies to improve site usability, track NPS, or offer a promotion to ultimately increase key conversion metrics. Every visit to a website is an opportunity to engage with customers, but not every customer is the same, so giving the same treatment to all visitors would be a mistake. Site Intercept provides the ability to pinpoint the right visitors with over 20 behavioral, location, and device-type variables.
• Qualtrics Employee Engagement software makes it easy for supervisors to figure out which levers to pull to increase engagement—and it functions in real-time. Employee engagement is a proven driver of revenue, quality, productivity and customer satisfaction. With only 30% of employees engaged in their work, it’s more important than ever to measure and improve engagement. Qualtrics Employee Engagement provides managers with customized, individual dashboards, allowing them to slice and dice employee data with a simple click. Couple that with sophisticated hierarchical reporting and incredible flexibility, and now it’s easier than ever for managers to make data-driven decisions to increase engagement within his or her piece of an organization.
• Qualtrics Innovation Exchange was announced at the first Qualtrics Insight Summit and launched in July of 2014. The Qualtrics Innovation Exchange is a revolutionary new partnership channel that helps organizations drive innovation efforts. The Innovation Exchange provides 24-hour, on-demand access to expert content, professional services, and turnkey solutions for specific business problems. Functioning as a searchable online library of thought leadership and all things insight-related, the Innovation exchange where thought leaders can create and share best practices, proven methods, and innovative survey designs. Additionally, the Innovation Exchange partners with other enterprise systems like Salesforce, making trigger surveys at CX touch points and integrated customer experience tracking, easier than ever.

Qualtrics not only helps organizations build world-class customer experience programs, we’re also committed to providing our customers with the best customer experience in the industry:

• Award-winning customer service – Qualtrics provides superior customer service, distinguished by free, unlimited 24/7 support. In an era when it’s difficult to get anyone in an organization to pick up the phone, Qualtrics employees answer every call.
• Implementation – Where it may take some competitors weeks or even months to fully implement a program, Qualtrics helps customers through the onboarding process in just a matter of days. Our professional services team works with our new customers to ensure that their implementation experience goes smoothly and quickly.
• Qualtrics University – Qualtrics customers have free access to the Qualtrics University website with hundreds of articles, videos and other training resources to help users create successful customer experience programs. Every support call Qualtrics University team members receive is answered within three rings. If a call goes unanswered, large lights flash from the support team’s ceiling, letting all team members know that an urgent call is waiting and must be answered immediately.
• Enthusiastic, engaged customers – Qualtrics recently hosted their annual Insight Summit, the only insight event of its kind. The event attracted over 1,300 “insight seekers” to Salt Lake City, Utah, to learn from some of the industry’s brightest minds and to dive deeper into the customer insight capabilities of Qualtrics products. Customers also benefit from various networking opportunities, one-on-one trainings, as well as top-tier entertainment. The response to the Insight Summit was overwhelmingly positive —evidence of an enthusiastic and engaged customer base.

We continue to learn from our customers as they use Qualtrics products to pioneer new ways to measure and improve CX. We are inspired by their innovative work and amazing results!

Rant and Rave

1) Company Overview:

Rant & Rave provides customer engagement solutions with a difference. Created with the belief that fundamentally brands and consumers want the same thing – to deliver and receive great service – half of the FTSE rely on the Rant & Rave platform to proactively communicate with and gather fast feedback from their customers. By reducing customer effort and taking real-time inspired action, brands are able to transform Ranters into Ravers and happy customers into engaged Ravers – lifelong advocates.

2) Make the Case:

Rant & Rave was launched to the world in April 2014, following a rebrand from the more traditional company name of Rapide Communication. Since our rebrand we’ve made it our mission to shake up the customer experience industry, challenge the status quo and to encourage our customers to question why they do the things they do, rather than continue doing things the way they’ve always been done. As well as forming a natural allegiance with challenger brands like OVO Energy and Papa John’s who thrive on shaking up their industries, we’ve also retained and grown our relationships with more conservative brands like water companies and banks. That’s because Rant & Rave and its clients share a common goal – to reduce effort and fundamentally make it easier to be a customer. Our mission to be different runs much deeper than quirky branding and tone of voice though, it’s reflected in the way we run our business, from the way we engage our clients to the innovative solutions we develop. We’re reaping the benefits alongside the brands, enjoying year on year growth of 85%.

The Rant & Rave Platform

Unlike many customer experience vendors who only offer Voice of the Customer capabilities, the Rant & Rave Platform provides a holistic, customer engagement solution with two distinctive areas – Proactive Communication and Fast Feedback.

Our Proactive Communication modules, Inform and Interact, allow brands to send their customers timely messages – whether it’s a confirmation, reminder, or marketing message, but also allows customers to reply back, turning their communications into intelligent two-way conversations. By proactively communicating with customers in this way and giving them the information they need before they have to ask for it, our clients have seen 100% service performance, reduced no-shows by 20% and dramatically cut costs, ultimately relieving the pressure on their internal resources.

Our Fast Feedback solution then closes the loop, capturing feedback from customers in real-time, at the Moment of Truth, when emotions are at their highest. Again, we take a unique approach to the way we capture feedback. Because we believe that sharing thoughts on a brand shouldn’t be a chore, we make it as fun, easy and convenient as possible, with no lengthy questionnaires or surveys. Because no two customers are the same, we advocate a multi-channel approach, allowing customers to share their thoughts through the channel that best suits them – whether that’s via text message, voice recording or email. We simply ask for a score and comment on how the brand is performing, allowing customers to say what matters to them most, without the constraints of tick boxes or lengthy questions on unrelated topics.

Our Sentiment Engine uses text analytics to understand every word in real-time and presents the results back, giving our clients the ability to see all of their feedback, reoccurring themes and issues, and ideas for improvements all in one place, so they can take immediate action.

By using the Rant & Rave Platform our clients have seen on average a 150% ROI, 52% response rates, 36% reduction in complaints, 50% increase in NPS and 75% more insight from their customers.

Engaging Employees on the Frontline

One of our latest innovations, Frontline Engagement, has already made waves in the Contact Centre environment, by making Voice of the Customer and measuring performance a fun and exciting exercise for the whole team. We’ve gamified the experience by taking all of the brand’s customer feedback and displaying it on a Dashboard that’s available for the entire team to see. Employees can create a profile and add their own photo (much like they would on their Social Media profiles) and see how they’re performing on a range of topics from skills and knowledge to attitude and speed of service. Average scores are then presented in a live league table, so employees can see where they need to improve and management can identify where extra training is needed and identify opportunities for personal development.

What makes us different?

• We’re the only UK provider to offer both a Proactive Communication and Fast Feedback solution as part of one all encompassing package – the Rant & Rave Platform. Enabling our clients to keep their customers informed and engaged with speedy, multi-channel messages and capture their feedback in real-time.
• No survey can anticipate everything your customers think, so we keep things simple and make sure that the end-customers can share their feedback in their own words, at a time that’s convenient to them and through the channel they prefer (whether that’s text message, voice recording or email). By capturing feedback in this way, our clients see up to 90% response rates.
• We use a combination of Event Triggered Requests and Listening Posts to ensure our clients know exactly how their customers feel about them, in real-time. Event Triggered Requests can be sent at specific emotive points when a customer is likely to give feedback, whilst our always-on Listening Posts are there for the moments that brands can’t predict, allowing them to hear feedback even from customers who may have chosen not to buy.
• We use a combination of Man and Machine to make sure that the job is done properly. 80% of all feedback is understood instantly – including any obscure sarcastic comments, idioms and emoticons that often leave other Text Analysis Providers scratching their heads. But uniquely, when the Sentiment Engine can’t quite work something out, it will flag the item of feedback for our team of analysts to look at.

Real life happens in real-time, so our solutions are designed to give our clients the information they need in the moment, so they can make changes quickly and efficiently. Whilst other providers may be able to produce weekly, monthly or quarterly reports, by working in real-time, our clients see on average a 36% reduction in complaints and a 50% increase in Csat and NPS.

ResponseTek

1) Company overview:

As a pioneer of customer experience management, ResponseTek is the global leader in enterprise CEM software, connecting over 500 million customers to the brands that serve them in over 60 countries. The ResponseTek Listening Platform™ makes it easy for customers to share real-time feedback on key interactions wherever they occur – contact center, retail, online, field operations or social. Customer feedback is translated into performance metrics and dashboards that inform the organization about mission-critical improvements, and ResponseTek empowers the frontline to close the loop with the end customer by triggering alerts and managing corrective actions that need to be taken.

2) Make the case:

The Listening Platform is backed by our proprietary big data engine, designed to transform high volumes of real-time customer data into meaningful and actionable insight. Built for scale, this engine enables the immediate processing of multi-channel feedback and integrates it with contextual data to deliver rich insights for optimizing customer experience. We continually update and optimize our platform by harnessing CEM best practices and the ever-changing needs of our clients. This spring marks the 33rd consecutive quarterly release, delivering timely innovation.

Our platform is used in a variety of verticals but has garnered the most success within the telecom industry. With over 60 telecom clients, we are experts in CEM for telecommunications; we’ve gained a deep understanding of its pain points, organizational complexities, best practices and benchmarks. Our client team has years of experience designing, implementing and optimizing customer experience programs across the globe that drive true results, such as an increase of 25 NPS points within 100 days.

Across industries, the ResponseTek Listening Platform, empowers organizations to:

Listen Everywhere. We make it easy for customers to share real-time feedback on key interactions wherever they occur – contact center, retail locations, field operations, web, or social. Any device, any channel, any language, anywhere – we deliver personalized and in the moment customer insights through structured and unstructured collection.

Learn. Using proprietary analytics, we translate customer feedback into key performance metrics, and dashboards that inform the entire organization about mission-critical improvements.

Insight and reporting is delivered in one place and on-demand. Intuitive reports and dashboards ensure alignment and transparency across the business on customer experience as it happens through desktop and mobile reporting. Through sophisticated organizational hierarchies, the right information is delivered to the right role. Organizations can gain an omni-channel view of the customer across every touchpoint across the customer journey.

“The ResponseTek platform is a key enabler for improving customer experience, by reacting in real time to the voice of the customer, and helps us measure the impact of our actions on customer loyalty.” – T-Mobile Austria

Act. We believe that there is no ROI from measuring feedback alone – it comes from the business improvements that are made as a result of taking action from the customer insights. We directly empower the frontline to close the loop with the end customer by triggering alerts and managing corrective actions that must be taken. Action is broken down into two parts of engagement – employee and customer:

Employee Engagement. This goes beyond simply distributing and reporting results to employees. ResponseTek enables and drives actions for employees to make improvements on what they are learning from customer feedback being reported to them. It’s about getting the right actions to the right people and having visibility to track the status of it. By tailoring workflows to fit the needs of the business, the frontlines are empowered and have a seamless process for service recovery.

Customer Engagement. As companies become more customer centric, it’s important to measure the impact of the service recovery initiative. The company may think that they’ve done a good job in closing the loop with the customer, but without direct feedback from the customer, there is no direct proof or ROI.

The Listening Platform automatically assigns and tracks actions for customer follow up and recovery, and a post-recovery survey can be sent to directly measure the state of mind of the customer at the end of the process. This allows companies to compare before and after follow up scenarios and associate value with the action.

Another aspect of customer engagement is experience based marketing initiatives. Through the intelligence of our listening and learning functions, personalized and in-context messages are delivered to the customer. Targeted messages can be delivered for both positive and negative experience, and promoter activation initiatives can be leveraged through promotions.

“ResponseTek helps us every day. Every day, every hour, somebody is logging in and looking at the dashboard, looking to see what action they need to take, what good story they can tell at our next meeting. We use ResponseTek to help us find those, as well as to find the opportunities. I would say that’s happening minute by minute in the organization.” – North American Insurance Provider

Develop. We understand that the first step in operating a successful CEM program is having a solution that fully addresses the business’ needs. The client team at ResponseTek has deep vertical knowledge and are experts in designing, launching and running successful solutions. Each solution involves a complete and unique deployment, covering collection, reporting and customized workflows.

Grow. Once the program is launched, we stick with our clients through weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual meetings, along with 24/7 technical support.

“We meet with them on a weekly basis to discuss the program. We have a more senior level meeting on a monthly basis. Essentially, it’s relatively painless; their availability is instant, and they’re there especially at the beginning when we especially needed to launch the program and integrate the program within the business. It was effortless; that’s the best way I can describe it.” – North America Insurance Client

Walker

1) Company Overview:

Walker is a customer intelligence consulting firm. Helping businesses for more than 75 years, Walker’s team of consultants provides tailored, comprehensive solutions to help companies achieve their business objectives and grow shareholder value. Walker implements customer experience initiatives with leading B-to-B companies to increase customer retention, streamline processes, improve quality, strengthen relationships, and accelerate growth. Walker provides a broad and unique range of services including advanced analytics, cutting-edge technology, expert consultation, and end-to-end program management to deliver results for our clients. And our approach works – Walker clients outperform the market by more than six to one!

2) Make the Case:

Like any company that is proud of their people and services we’re tempted to tell you all the great things about Walker. But, we’ll focus on five things we really want you to know.

Experience that can’t be overlooked

Without a doubt, every company is proud of their people. Our vast experience is too important to overlook when considering what makes Walker different. Our consultants have far more experience and tenure than any other company in our industry. In fact, the average level of experience among our

senior consultants is 18 years! Our clients constantly tell us that this experience matters. All facets of our client engagements are managed by a single Walker team that meticulously manages every portion of a client program. In fact, we do far more for our clients – our project implementation teams handle all the details others won’t touch.

Summary – our people make all the difference.

It’s all in one place

New companies seem to be popping up every day offering a variety of customer experience services – technology, analytics, consulting, research, and more. However, no company offers it all in one place like Walker. We have unmatched comprehensive solutions that are seamlessly integrated and we do not depend on third party support for professional services like most others. Everything at Walker is run in- house.

Not only does this provide unmatched flexibility, but it allows us to more completely serve the specific needs of each client with highly tailored solutions.

Summary – we deliver the right solution for each client.

Highly customized, fully integrated technology

People often don’t think of Walker as a technology company. And yet, we developed our first technology platforms in the late 90s, long before most of our competitors even existed.

Walker’s tools are specifically designed for complex B-to-B companies and, unlike others that offer a preconfigured platform, Walker delivers a customized approach, combining the right set of technology solutions for each client. Our development team is integrated into every CX initiative. They are in-house and onshore.

Finally, we feel too many technology providers limit the use of users because of expensive subscription fees. We have eliminated these fees to encourage adoption of our cloud-based tools.

Summary – the right technology for each client

Data scientists to drive more insights with advanced analytics

While other companies are encouraging their clients to conduct more surveys we’re suggesting companies do more with fewer surveys. At Walker our newest approaches go beyond traditional methods to leverage more sources of customer intelligence and incorporate predictive and prescriptive analytics. We have a talented, in-house team of data scientists with deep-bench strength and our analytic tools are woven into all relevant aspects of our technology tools.

Summary – Walker analytics allow clients to do more with less.

B-to-B focus that drives results

While many tailor their B-to-C offering to adapt to B-to-B needs, we focus almost exclusively on the unique needs of B-to-B companies which include complicated purchasing processes, layers of supply chain relationships, and complex strategic accounts. This focus is critical as we learn about each of our clients’ businesses and as we collaborate with customer experience leaders to establish and track important success metrics.

We also track the collective success of our clients through the Walker Index, a stock index based on the portfolio of Walker’s publicly-traded clients. This is an important measure of the impact of our work with clients and since its base year of 1994 the Walker Index has outperformed the broad markets by a multiple of more than six to one.

Summary – We specialize in delivering results for B-to-B companies

In 2014 Walker was proud to celebrate our 75th anniversary. Seventy-five years is a long time! But we recognize we’re only as good as what we deliver today and what we’re prepared to deliver tomorrow. We believe no company offers B-to-B companies the combination of people, services, and solutions like Walker. We’re ready for the future. More importantly, we’re ready to deliver results for each client we serve.