SEPTEMBER 2019
BryterCX delivers a suite of visualization, measurement, and monitoring tools to help businesses understand their customers better. The BryterCX journey management suite helps customer journeys — the steps customers take to get something done — become much more transparent and actionable. This helps businesses identify areas of improvement, processes ripe for automation, and even steps where something has gone wrong.
BryterCX, formerly ClickFox, commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) enterprises may realize by deploying and adopting BryterCX to better understand how customers complete a process to avoid issues and drive new opportunities. The purpose of this study is to provide readers with a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of the BryterCX journey management suite on their own customers.
To better understand the benefits, costs, and risks associated with this investment, Forrester interviewed several BryterCX customers with years of experience using BryterCX. These organizations include a consumer bank, a credit card servicer, and a public utility. All have focused their BryterCX implementations on supporting departments to better serve their current and new customers.
Prior to using BryterCX, these organizations struggled to understand customer interactions. They might have had a clear picture of how customers contacted them via email or phone, but not if that customer contacted them by email and then called an agent. The result was repetition and frustrated customers who felt they needed to keep calling for updates, leading to higher customer churn and other issues.
With BryterCX, organizations have built a taxonomy of customer journeys and, through those, have identified several benefits leading to significant financial improvements. To simplify explanations, these customers have been combined as a composite organization to illustrate quantified benefits and financial results. This composite is a financial services organization that receives 40 million contacts, mostly related to support questions and payments, across agent, interactive voice response (IVR), web, email, and chat channels.
Reduced and avoided transaction confirmation calls to agents:
15% fewer first contacts
Agent call channel share:
From 23% to 20%
IVR channel share:
From 27% to 29%
Avoided payment write-offs attributable to BryterCX:
0.75% fewer
ROI
321%
Benefits PV
$22.7 million
NPV
$17.3 million
Quantified benefits. The following three-year, risk-adjusted present value (PV) quantified benefits are based on a composite organization representative of the interviewed companies:
BryterCX analysis tools have helped organizations identify common questions and tasks or even whole groups of questions and tasks that would often lead to a follow-up call, such as activating a card, resetting a PIN, making a payment, and requesting payment arrangements. Customer journey visualization and analysis with BryterCX identified that customers would often call after completing one of these tasks because they wanted to confirm the task or transaction had been completed. With a simple change to ensure that an email or text notification is sent immediately, organizations have avoided a significant number of new contacts. Forrester estimates that the composite organization, without this change, would have had to support 15% more calls of this type each year (after a first-year ramp-up of 12%) with agent-led support, for a cost savings of $5.8 million over the three-year analysis period.
BryterCX helped shift contacts away from expensive agent channels to the less expensive and more convenient IVR channel — and ushered in a significant shift in calls to online options. The composite organization’s agent-led calls have decreased from 23% of total contacts down to 20% since BryterCX, meaning 900,000 contacts have shifted away from expensive agent-led calls to less expensive IVR and online options (with even more efficiency in Years 2 and 3), not just saving costs but providing better options for customers who prefer these channels. This shift adds up to a three-year savings of $12.2 million for the composite organization.
More efficient and convenient service can drive new revenue opportunities and protect current revenue. With BryterCX, organizations were able to identify oft- repeated processes, steps that caused confusion or issues, and process flows with unintended incentives. For example, customers that needed help with a payment arrangement would call multiple times in the hope that a different agent might offer them a better arrangement; as such agents were unintentionally driving the number of calls up, as customers tried to game the system and get a better deal. This complexity and confusion led to more late payments and more customers unable to break out of the payment arrangement cycle, resulting in repayment delays and even write-offs. Customer journey visualization, measurement, and monitoring with BryterCX helped identify these issues, and organizations now empower agents to provide the “first, best offer” and clearer communication, meaning fewer payment delays and write-offs, happier customers, and higher use of automated payment options with IVR. The composite organization experiences a reduction in account charge-offs attributable to BryterCX of 0.5% in Year 1 and 0.75% in Years 2 and 3, adding up to a present value of $4.6 million over three years.
Unquantified benefits. The composite organization, based on interviewed companies, experienced the following benefits, which are not quantified for this study:
The composite organization over the same timeframe as its BryterCX implementation has improved NPS by 10 points.1 While NPS, a loyalty metric based on a customer's reported likelihood to recommend a company, is difficult to attribute any specifics to a process improvement or technology investment. Journey analytics with BryterCX has identified opportunities that can contribute to improved NPS, as well as provide more visibility and analysis into NPS attribution analysis. “We know the contribution of each journey to overall NPS because we have ClickFox,” said the digital consumer team manager at a retail bank.
Customer journey management, monitoring, and analysis have not only uncovered issues such as payment arrangements, but it has also identified other opportunities by highlighting common requests and common digital flows where customers tried to get something done, gave up once it didn’t work right or required agent assistance, and even in frustration may have left for a competitor. Uncovering these processes and reducing customer friction has improved customer retention and driven more revenue.
Interviewed organizations shared several stories of unexpected interface or application errors in online and IVR systems. For example, an IVR system change accidentally blocked the completion of a simple automated step, and 30,000 calls a month escalated to an agent. With 40 million total contacts a year, 30,000 didn’t show up on their old aggregated reports until BryterCX monitoring and analysis identified the cross-channel chokepoint that needed fixing.
Costs. The composite organization, based on interviews with organizations that have implemented BryterCX, experienced the following risk-adjusted PV costs:
The composite organization pays for BryterCX license and services at a three-year present value of less than $4.3 million.
The composite organization focuses the equivalent of two employees on the BryterCX environment, managing data, preparing reports, and other related tasks, adding up to $220,000 in annual resource costs for a present value of $547,000 over three years.
The organization had a team of 20 employees involved in the six-month implementation period. Some were involved full-time while some were more occasional contributors, working on tasks including: managing the proof-of-concept (PoC) process, setting up data feeds, and often spending time negotiating for access to those feeds, managing and reporting to stakeholders, managing and normalizing data, and developing analysis process and reports. The total implementation resource costs add up to an estimated $585,000 — with the licensing implementation services total initial costs adding up to nearly $664,000.
Forrester’s interviews with three existing customers and subsequent financial analysis found that a composite organization based on these interviewed companies experiences a risk-adjusted present value of benefits of $22.7 million over three years versus costs of $5.4 million, adding up to a net present value (NPV) of $17.3 million and an ROI of 321%.
From the information provided in the interviews, Forrester has constructed a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) framework for those organizations considering implementing BryterCX.
The objective of the framework is to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility, and risk factors that affect the investment decision. Forrester took a multistep approach to evaluate the impact that BryterCX can have on an organization:
Interviewed BryterCX stakeholders and Forrester analysts to gather data relative to BryterCX.
Interviewed three organizations using BryterCX to obtain data with respect to costs, benefits, and risks.
Designed a composite organization based on characteristics of the interviewed organizations.
Constructed a financial model representative of the interviews using the TEI methodology and risk-adjusted the financial model based on issues and concerns of the interviewed organizations.
Employed four fundamental elements of TEI in modeling BryterCX’s impact: benefits, costs, flexibility, and risks. Given the increasing sophistication that enterprises have regarding ROI analyses related to IT investments, Forrester’s TEI methodology serves to provide a complete picture of the total economic impact of purchase decisions. Please see Appendix A for additional information on the TEI methodology.
Readers should be aware of the following:
This study is commissioned by BryterCX and delivered by Forrester Consulting. It is not meant to be used as a competitive analysis.
Forrester makes no assumptions as to the potential ROI that other organizations will receive. Forrester strongly advises that readers use their own estimates within the framework provided in the report to determine the appropriateness of an investment in BryterCX.
BryterCX reviewed and provided feedback to Forrester, but Forrester maintains editorial control over the study and its findings and does not accept changes to the study that contradict Forrester’s findings or obscure the meaning of the study.
BryterCX provided the customer names for the interviews but did not participate in the interviews.
For more information about this study, visit www.brytercx.com/resources#TEI
For this study, Forrester conducted three interviews with BryterCX customers. Interviewed customers include the following:
Industry | REGION | INTERVIEWEE | CONTACT VOLUME | NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES |
---|---|---|---|---|
Consumer banking | Regional US focus | Director, customer experience; Customer analytics manager | 10M+ contacts per month | Account and transaction tasks; account questions |
Credit card servicing | Global with US focus | Manager | 8M contacts per month | Private-label cards with individual customer groups; payments |
Utilities | Regional US power company | Analytics manager, customer experience | 1M contacts per month | Service questions; payments, including payment arrangements |
Interviewees identified several issues and opportunities leading up to their decision to investigate a solution that could help them understand customer choices and cross-channel journeys more effectively:
Interviewed organizations thought agent contact rates were higher than they should be, but they didn’t know enough to identify and fix underlying issues that led to IVR-to-agent call escalation (and a new call logged) or prevailing reasons customers might call for agent support. “We had customers who would call to activate their card but still elect to talk to an agent. They would use the activation line for general support questions,” said the CX director at the consumer bank.
In addition to what organizations saw as too many new contacts, too many customers who needed help were opting to call an agent for support over IVR or web options. Again, organizations didn’t have a clear picture of why customers were making these choices. They didn’t know what changes they might make that would help customers more frequently choose these mostly self-service channels as trusted and convenient options. “We could look up traffic for a single channel but didn’t have a baseline. We didn’t have a way to look at what our customers were doing over time,” said the manager at the credit card servicer.
Particularly related to payments, interviewees wanted to reduce their rate of write-offs but didn’t have a clear picture of why a write-off might occur and what they could do to better assist customers.
The interviewed organizations searched for a solution that could help them:
Understand their customers better.
Identify not just a problem but the underlying causes.
Reduce new contacts and more efficiently handle existing ones.
Protect against revenue losses and identify new opportunities.
Interviewed customers evaluated multiple options and vendors, chose BryterCX, and began implementation:
Interviewees focused their BryterCX analyses on their support channels.
They connected BryterCX to a number of data sources for monitoring and analysis — between 15 and 25 sources for the interviewed organizations.
The interviews revealed that key results from the BryterCX investment include:
BryterCX helped visualize, measure, and monitor customer journeys to identify a number of existing — and up to then unknown — issues. Quickly resolving these issues, such as making sure a transaction confirmation was sent immediately instead of within a set time, enabled immediate reductions in new contact volumes. “Because we can see that relationship, now the event triggers real-time,” said the customer analytics manager at the consumer bank.
With an understanding of why customers would call an agent instead of completing a task within an automated system, the organizations saw more customers choose IVR and web options over agent calls and more calls contained within those automated systems. For example, one interviewee discovered a common customer journey that was blocked because of an IVR issue, which led to 30,000 calls a month escalating to an agent. “Unbeknownst to the business, a change was made in the IVR system that somehow stopped a basic check from happening,” said the manager at the credit card servicer. Quickly fixing the issue helped contain calls and reduced reliance on agents.
One interviewee found that inconsistent payment arrangement standards led to more write-offs. The company thought it was providing value by empowering agents to negotiate payment terms, but that actually led to confusion and a higher rate of default or delayed payments; that meant it would be that much tougher to catch up the next month and avoid yet another payment arrangement. By changing to a standard “first, best offer,” the organization saw a significant reduction in payment delays and write-offs, leading to recovered revenue and margin for the business. “Our eyes were open to the opportunity that existed around cost reduction as it related to that particular call type,” said the analytics manager at the utility company.
Based on the interviews, Forrester constructed a TEI framework, a composite company, and an associated ROI analysis that illustrates the areas financially affected. The composite organization is representative of the three companies that Forrester interviewed and is used to present the aggregate financial analysis in the next section. The composite organization that Forrester synthesized from the customer interviews has the following characteristics:
Description of composite. A financial services organization that provides consumer services involving customer transactions completed via web or phone, payment processing, and support for these services. The organization manages about 20 million accounts and receives about 30 million contacts per year, including phone support that spans product and technical service to transaction processing.
Deployment characteristics. The composite organization’s BryterCX implementation connects and consolidates data from 15 to 20 data feeds across a variety of customer tasks. For the initial phase of deployment, focus is on improving agent-IVR ratios, with more focus on web to come.
Ref. | Benefit | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Total | Present Value |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Atr | Cost savings from reduced and avoided contacts | $1,836,000 | $2,524,500 | $2,776,950 | $7,137,450 | $5,841,818 |
Btr | More efficient contact channel cost savings | $4,331,250 | $5,011,875 | $5,513,063 | $14,856,188 | $12,221,591 |
Ctr | Revenue retention | $1,275,000 | $2,103,750 | $2,314,125 | $5,692,875 | $4,636,364 |
Total benefits (risk-adjusted) | $7,442,250 | $9,640,125 | $10,604,138 | $27,686,513 | $22,699,773 |
The table above shows the total of all benefits across the areas listed below, as well as present values (PVs) discounted at 10%. Over three years, the composite organization expects risk-adjusted total benefits to be a PV of nearly $22.7 million.
Customer journey visualization, measurement, and monitoring helped interviewed organizations identify process bottlenecks, incomplete applications, and unintended consequences that result in their customers being confused or stuck at a point where they need to contact organization support resources. Once these problems were identified, organizations could address them, helping avoid those contacts. Interviewed organizations identified a number of examples:
The consumer bank identified a customer journey where users would complete an online transaction and then call an agent after about 10 or 15 minutes to confirm their task was completed successfully.
The credit card servicer discovered 30,000 calls were jumping to agent interaction after a certain step in an IVR process.
The utility company learned customers would make a payment arrangement on the phone or by IVR and would follow up that contact with a call to another agent.
In each of these examples, customer journey analytics helped organizations learn more about their customers and target areas to troubleshoot and fix. After some investigation, these organizations learned why customers were making these choices and identified ways to change a task or process to make the customer’s journey more convenient, faster, and one in which they could avoid calling an agent if they didn’t want to. For the three issues identified above, the organizations achieved the following results:
The consumer bank learned customers wanted to confirm their transactions because the email or text notification that might take up to 30 minutes hadn’t arrived yet. With a change to more immediate notifications, these calls became unnecessary. The CX director at a consumer bank said: “Because we can see that relationship now, we changed the event to trigger. As soon as you make the payment, you get the email.”
With the BryterCX customer journey analysis, the credit card servicer identified the point in the IVR process that was troubling customers. A code change in the IVR system had accidentally broken a confirmation step; fixing this problem helped customers complete this task within the IVR system. “We saw thousands of new calls a month to agents that should have been completed with IVR interaction,” said the manager at the credit card servicer.
The utility company learned that its payment arrangement policies had unintended consequences. Agents were empowered to negotiate customer payment terms; as a result, customers would call back to try another agent and see what they would offer. With a policy change to “first, best offer” and an effort to make sure agents and customers got that message, the need for repeated calls was eliminated.
With these and other areas identified, interviewed organizations would have had to manage additional contacts. Forrester estimates that the composite organization would have seen 15% more calls related to issues like transaction support and payment processing without BryterCX. Forrester assumes:
Contacts impacted by these changes total 6 million per year.
The composite would have had to manage 12% to 15% more calls each year — 12% in the first year during BryterCX ramp-up and as more information and learning is gleaned from customer journey analysis.
This adds up to between 720,000 and 1,089,000 avoided calls each year. Without BryterCX, the composite would not have known why these calls were happening — or even that they could be avoided.
The average cost per contact is estimated at $3. While contacts, especially agent calls, are typically more expensive, these contacts were shorter than average (e.g., confirming their transaction went through).
The reduction in calls can vary based on:
The volume of payment arrangement and transaction-related calls.
The speed of notifications.
Customers who still may still call even after an email confirmation.
To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding the annual benefit totals as shown in the table, for a three- year risk-adjusted total PV of $5.8 million.
Impact risk is the risk that the business or technology needs of the organization may not be met by the investment, resulting in lower overall total benefits. The greater the uncertainty, the wider the potential range of outcomes for benefit estimates.
Ref. | Metric | Calc. | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
A1 | Total contacts per year | 30,000,000 | 33,000,000 | 36,300,000 | |
A2 | Total contacts per year impacted by process improvements | A1*20% | 6,000,000 | 6,600,000 | 7,260,000 |
A3 | Improvement in first contact resolution with BryterCX | Composite | 12% | 15% | 15% |
A4 | Total avoided additional contacts per year | A2*A3 | 720,000 | 990,000 | 1,089,000 |
A5 | Average cost per contact (blended rate) | Composite | $3.00 | $3.00 | $3.00 |
At | Cost savings from reduced and avoided contacts | A4*A5 | $2,160,000 | $2,970,000 | $3,267,000 |
Risk adjustment | ↓15% | ||||
Atr | Cost savings from reduced and avoided contacts (risk-adjusted) | $1,836,000 | $2,524,500 | $2,776,950 |
In addition to avoiding new contacts, interviewed organizations also saw more contacts shift to automated options, particularly agent calls shifting to IVR. With BryterCX customer journey visualization, measurement, and monitoring, they also identified bottlenecks and issue areas that were challenging to visualize when data was only collected by channel and more transaction-based instead of lifecycle-based. “We could measure all these things individually, but we didn’t have a way to say what they are doing over time,” said the manager at the credit card servicer. The servicer couldn’t tell why, for example, when a customer needed to contact the organization, they opted to contact an agent first — and if the customer would have preferred a more convenient option.
Interviewed organizations mentioned several areas where customer journey analytics identified common tasks completed via a more expensive and often less convenient channel. Journey monitoring and analytics helped organizations during roll out new features to not only measure the impact at an aggregate level but monitor changes in customer behavior. For example:
The credit card servicer implemented text notifications reminding customers of an upcoming payment due date, including a link to go directly to the account payment page. The manager at the credit card servicer said, “From an analytical perspective, we can look at things like how those strategies are working.”
It also used BryterCX to analyze customer journeys through all its IVR functionality menus to look for issues and compare before-and-after results of a change in IVR flow.
The utility company trained agents to remind customers of online payment and payment arrangement options, along with email communication.
The consumer bank identified card replacement as a common process that could be automated. The customer analytics manager said, “There was little that you could do, if anything, to replace your card digitally.”
With these journeys identified, organizations can monitor results and identify successes or areas for more investigation. Overall, these and other changes have led to a reduction in agent-led calls, with more calls going to the IVR channel plus some shift to web channels. “We’ve seen good movement from traditionally high-cost, high-intensity engagements for both the customer and the agent to smoother, less intrusive, and cheaper options,” said the manager at the credit card servicer. For the composite organization, this is apparent in the before-and-after mix of calls across each channel:
Agent-led | IVR | Web | |
---|---|---|---|
Before BryterCX | 23% | 27% | 50% |
After BryterCX | 20% | 29% | 51% |
Every call where a customer opts for an automated channel instead of calling an agent results in significant cost savings. For the composite organization, 900,000 contacts shifted from agent to IVR or web. Of those 900,000, there are:
600,000 more contacts on the IVR system.
300,000 more contacts via web channels.
Forrester estimates an agent call to be $9, while IVR and web contacts are estimated between $2.75 and $1.75 per contact (with some additional efficiencies gained in Years 2 and 3). These shifts add up to significant cost savings.
With such a broad scope of calls, even a small change in these estimates can cause significant variance in results. In addition, there may be other influences on contact channel shift outside of BryterCX.
To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 25%, adding up to the annual benefits shown in the table below and yielding a three-year risk-adjusted total PV of $12.2 million.
Ref. | Metric | Calc. | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
B1 | Total contacts per year | A1 | 30,000,000 | 33,000,000 | 36,300,000 |
B2 | Percent of agent-led phone contacts before BryterCX | 23% | 6,900,000 | 7,590,000 | 8,349,000 |
B3 | Percent of IVR phone contacts before BryterCX | 27% | 8,100,000 | 8,910,000 | 9,801,000 |
B4 | Percent of web contacts before BryterCX | 50% | 15,000,000 | 16,500,000 | 18,150,000 |
B5 | Percent of agent-led phone contacts today | 20% | 6,000,000 | 6,600,000 | 7,260,000 |
B6 | Percent of IVR phone contacts today | 29% | 8,700,000 | 9,570,000 | 10,527,000 |
B7 | Percent of web contacts today | 51% | 15,300,000 | 16,830,000 | 18,513,000 |
B8 | Average cost per phone contact | Composite | $9.00 | $9.00 | $9.00 |
B9 | Average cost per IVR contact | Composite | $2.75 | $2.50 | $2.50 |
B10 | Average cost per web contact | Composite | $2.25 | $1.75 | $1.75 |
Bt | More efficient contact channel cost savings | ([contact costs before]- [contact costs today]) |
$5,775,000 | $6,682,500 | $7,350,750 |
Risk adjustment | ↓25% | ||||
Btr | More efficient contact channel cost savings (risk-adjusted) | $4,331,250 | $5,011,875 | $5,513,063 |
Interviewed organizations have used customer journey analytics to identify ways to better serve customers, protect revenue, and create new opportunities. For the composite organization, this benefit category is primarily focused on revenue retention benefits as a result of avoided customer payment write-offs from changed payment arrangement standards — but this benefit could also include customer retention or churn, business opportunities, and other revenue-related benefits.
Interviewed organizations felt that processes around payments could be improved but really hadn’t identified there was a problem until BryterCX customer journey visualization and measurement highlighted some surprising, unintended results:
The utility company learned that customers would contact the organization to make payment arrangements and then would call back 10 or 15 minutes later to see what the next agent could offer. This led to repeated calls and could also impact customer satisfaction.
In addition, the utility company realized that constantly negotiating payment arrangements meant customers weren’t always getting the best deal, and even a small improvement could help more customers break the cycle of having to arrange payments month after month, sometimes eventually leading to default. “There’s a cost associated with deferring or delaying payments and potentially having to write off those that can’t pay. It’s better for our customers and saves money — it’s a real win-win overall.”
The credit card servicer looked at payment-related customer journeys to identify ways to provide more value (while also helping avoid calls or shifting contacts to more efficient channels). The manager there said: “Customers can get a text message that says, ‘Hey, you have a payment due in five days. Click on this link if you want to go ahead and make a payment,’ and we looked at how that strategy played out — people are responding to greater convenience.”
For the composite organization, these benefits are quantified in terms of avoided accounts defaulted leading to organizational write-offs. Forrester assumes:
Of the total contacts, 1.5 million are related to payment arrangements.
Due to better understanding of and communication with customers as a result of BryterCX customer journey analysis — and resulting business and process changes — the organization reduces its rate of account payment write-offs by 0.5% in Year 1 and 0.75% in Years 2 and 3. For the composite, that adds up to 7,500 avoided write-offs in Year 1, more than 12,000 in Year 2, and nearly 14,000 in Year 3.
Each account write-off is estimated at $200, which adds up to annual benefits of between $1.3 million to $2.3 million.
Payment arrangements can be difficult to estimate; some inputs are highly variable, such as:
The rate of payment contacts and write-offs may be much lower.
The amount written off for each payment-related problem is very dependent on customer utility usage (which itself is dependent on a number of factors including economic status and region).
The impact from BryterCX may vary; not every organization may have such a clear-cut and fixable example.
To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this benefit downward by 15%, yielding a three-year risk-adjusted total PV of $4.6 million.
Ref. | Metric | Calc. | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
C1 | Total contacts focused on payment arrangement requests | A1*5% | 1,500,000 | 1,650,000 | 1,815,000 |
C2 | Percentage of reduced payments write-offs attributable to BryterCX | Composite | 0.50% | 0.75% | 0.75% |
C3 | Average revenue per arranged payment | Composite | $200 | $$200 | $$200 |
Ct | Revenue retention | C1*C2*C3 | $1,500,000 | $2,475,000 | $2,722,500 |
Risk adjustment | ↓15% | ||||
Ctr | Revenue retention (risk-adjusted) | $1,275,000 | $2,103,750 | $2,314,125 |
Interviewed organizations identified several benefits that are either nonfinancial or have not yet been quantified. These include:
Improved customer service can be a key enabler of NPS growth. One organization that tracks NPS on a regular basis has correlated service and support improvements enabled by BryterCX.
As highlighted in the Revenue Retention benefit section, BryterCX customer journey analytics enhance new revenue opportunities. These customer journeys have helped organizations identify common steps leading to customer churn, as well as common steps that can be streamlined or automated to deliver new, more convenient, more widely used services. Avoiding customer churn, improving retention, and creating new products can all lead to increased revenue and business value.
Improved customer data and analytics can also be used to inform partners and push for their own changes and improvements. “We have been able to inform and educate our partners that promotions are down and help them identify a need for a new marketing or advertising push,” said the manager at the credit card servicer.
Beyond contact channel efficiency enabled by BryterCX, customer journey analytics can identify application issues for not just a quicker resolution, but resolution before something bad happens. “It would have been maybe three or four months before enough red flags would have identified the issue,” continued the manager at the credit card servicer.
The value of flexibility is clearly unique to each customer, and the measure of its value varies from organization to organization. There are multiple scenarios in which a customer might choose to implement BryterCX and later realize additional uses and business opportunities, but the composite organization’s primary future opportunity is focused on improving web contacts as a share of total contact center use; specifically:
For the composite organization (and interviewees), changes were mainly targeted at reducing agent-led calls and improving IVR options — both relatively focused in terms of resources and development. Web channels have not yet been a focus but are planned for further efficiency improvements and opportunities to deliver customer value. Developing an application to automate a process to provide customers with self-service options often requires more time, planning, and investment. For example, a web application may involve new security protocols, involve a data store that hasn’t been touched in the past, or require new skills — all of which take time. Interviewed organizations see leveraging their web channels as a key next strategy — and while the small shift has already resulted in measured benefits, a shift in the current web contact share from 51% to encourage higher usage could lead to significant savings. For example, an investment in greater web channel automation that shifts three percentage points of agent-led contacts to web would mean an additional $4.6 million to $5.9 million in contact center cost savings per year.
Flexibility would also be quantified when evaluated as part of a specific project (described in more detail in Appendix A).
Flexibility, as defined by TEI, represents an investment in additional capacity or capability that could be turned into business benefit for a future additional investment. This provides an organization with the "right" or the ability to engage in future initiatives but not the obligation to do so.
Ref. | Cost | Initial | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Total | Present Value |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Dtr | License and service fees | $78,750 | $1,680,000 | $1,680,000 | $1,680,000 | $5,118,750 | $4,256,661 |
Etr | Management costs | $0 | $220,000 | $220,000 | $220,000 | $660,000 | $547,107 |
Ftr | Implementation costs | $585,200 | $0 | $0 | $0 | $585,200 | $585,200 |
Total costs (risk-adjusted) | $663,950 | $1,900,000 | $1,900,000 | $1,900,000 | $6,363,950 | $5,388,968 |
The table above shows the total of all costs across the areas listed below, as well as present values (PVs) discounted at 10%. Over three years, the composite organization expects risk-adjusted total costs to be a PV of nearly $5.4 million.
For the composite organization, BryterCX licensing is estimated at about $1.7 million per year, plus a small amount of upfront implementation services. Licensing is based on a number of factors, including the amount of data feeds and the amount and frequency of data processing and analysis. Readers should use this as a guide but research more for their own situation.
Since licensing can vary based on needs, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 5%, yielding a three-year risk-adjusted total PV of $4.3 million.
Ref. | Metric | Calc. | Initial | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
D1 | BryterCX licensing and service fees | Composite | $75,000 | $1,600,000 | $1,600,000 | $1,600,000 |
Dt | License and service fees | D1 | $75,000 | $1,600,000 | $1,600,000 | $1,600,000 |
Risk adjustment | ↑5% | |||||
Dtr | License and service fees (risk-adjusted) | $78,750 | $1,680,000 | $1,680,000 | $1,680,000 |
To effectively manage and maintain their BryterCX investment, interviewed organizations dedicated several people to help build reports, manage data sources, regularly review data analysis findings to communicate to business managers, and maintain communication with BryterCX.
Ref. | Metric | Calc. | Initial | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
E1 | Employees focused on ongoing BryterCX management (FTE) | 2 | 2 | 2 | ||
E2 | Average annual fully burdened salary per employee | Composite | $100,000 | $100,000 | $100,000 | |
Et | Management costs | E1*E2 | $0 | $200,000 | $200,000 | $200,000 |
Risk adjustment | ↑10% | |||||
Etr | Administrative costs (risk-adjusted) | $0 | $220,000 | $220,000 | $220,000 |
For the composite organization, Forrester assumes:
While the group of people involved with BryterCX is larger, it adds up to a full-time equivalent (FTE) of two people.
Overall, the average fully burdened salary of this team is about $100,000 per year.
Resource requirement costs can vary not just based on salary but on the complexity of the BryterCX implementation, and more people may be needed to help with a greater number of data feeds and/or a greater number of analysis processing and reporting. To allow for these factors, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 10%, yielding a three-year risk-adjusted total PV of $547,000.
Implementation risk is the risk that a proposed investment may deviate from the original or expected requirements, resulting in higher costs than anticipated. The greater the uncertainty, the wider the potential range of outcomes for cost estimates.
Interviewed organizations spent about six months or more preparing and testing BryterCX before officially using it in production, which included:
Interviewed organizations have used customer journey analytics to identify ways to better serve customers, protect revenue, and create new opportunities. For the composite organization, this benefit category is primarily focused on revenue retention benefits as a result of avoided customer payment write-offs from changed payment arrangement standards — but this benefit could also include customer retention or churn, business opportunities, and other revenue-related benefits.
Interviewed organizations felt that processes around payments could be improved but really hadn’t identified there was a problem until BryterCX customer journey visualization and measurement highlighted some surprising, unintended results:
Implementation planning and building support with all data owners
Preparing data ingestion into BryterCX.
Building and implementing a PoC focused on one customer journey.
Building analysis tasks and report dashboards.
Training the team on the solution.
Educating and gaining support from business groups to prepare for changes that may be prioritized with the learning and insights from BryterCX-enabled customer journey analysis.
For the composite organization, this involved:
A seven-month implementation.
A total of 20 people involved in these tasks, who each spent an average of 700 hours across the seven-month period (the equivalent of working just over half-time).
An average implementation team fully burdened salary of $80,000, or the equivalent of about $38 per hour.
The amount of time needed to spend gaining upfront sponsorship from data owners and later support from business owners can be significant, especially for businesses with longer histories and with traditionally siloed business units and data sources, including banks and highly regulated industries like utilities.
To account for these risks, Forrester adjusted this cost upward by 10%, yielding a three-year risk-adjusted total PV of $585,000.
Ref. | Metric | Calc. | Initial | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
F1 | Number of FTEs on implementation team | Composite | 20 | |||
F2 | Average hourly rate per person, fully burdened | $80,000 per year | $38 | |||
F3 | Total hours contributed per person, on average | Composite | 700 | |||
Ft | Implementation costs | F1*F2*F3 | $532,000 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
Risk adjustment | ↑10% | |||||
Ftr | Implementation costs (risk-adjusted) | $585,200 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
These risk-adjusted ROI and NPV values are determined by applying risk-adjustment factors to the unadjusted results in each Benefit and Cost section.
Initial | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Total | Present Value | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Total Costs | ($663,950) | ($1,900,000) | ($1,900,000) | ($1,900,000) | ($6,363,950) | ($5,388,968) |
Total Benefits | $0 | $7,442,250 | $9,640,125 | $10,604,138 | $27,686,513 | $22,699,773 |
Net Benefits | ($663,950) | $5,542,250 | $7,740,125 | $8,704,138 | $21,322,563 | $17,310,805 |
ROI | 321% |
The financial results calculated in the Benefits and Costs sections can be used to determine the ROI and NPV period for the composite organization’s investment. Forrester assumes a yearly discount rate of 10% for this analysis.
The following information is provided by BryterCX. Forrester has not validated any claims and does not endorse BryterCX or its offerings.
With BryterCX, formerly ClickFox, organizations can achieve significant ROI while creating better customer experience. BryterCX Journey Management Suite transforms omnichannel event data into a clear map of customer behaviors and journeys.
Companies can monitor and measure their true customer journeys against key benchmarks to identify friction and quickly remediate issues to improve customer satisfaction, optimize front lines, and increase digital containment. BryterCX has helped the world’s leaders in banking, insurance, and utilities transition from a siloed focus on channel analytics to enterprisewide alignment around customer journeys.
For more information on this study or BryterCX, visit www.brytercx.com/resources#TEI or www.brytercx.com.
Total Economic Impact is a methodology developed by Forrester Research that enhances a company’s technology decision-making processes and assists vendors in communicating the value proposition of their products and services to clients. The TEI methodology helps companies demonstrate, justify, and realize the tangible value of IT initiatives to both senior management and other key business stakeholders.
Benefits represent the value delivered to the business by the product. The TEI methodology places equal weight on the measure of benefits and the measure of costs, allowing for a full examination of the effect of the technology on the entire organization.
Costs consider all expenses necessary to deliver the proposed value, or benefits, of the product. The cost category within TEI captures incremental costs over the existing environment for ongoing costs associated with the solution.
Flexibility represents the strategic value that can be obtained for some future additional investment building on top of the initial investment already made. Having the ability to capture that benefit has a PV that can be estimated.
Risks measure the uncertainty of benefit and cost estimates given: 1) the likelihood that estimates will meet original projections and 2) the likelihood that estimates will be tracked over time. TEI risk factors are based on “triangular distribution.”
The initial investment column contains costs incurred at “time 0” or at the beginning of Year 1 that are not discounted. All other cash flows are discounted using the discount rate at the end of the year. PV calculations are calculated for each total cost and benefit estimate. NPV calculations in the summary tables are the sum of the initial investment and the discounted cash flows in each year. Sums and present value calculations of the Total Benefits, Total Costs, and Cash Flow tables may not exactly add up, as some rounding may occur.
1 Net Promoter and NPS are registered service marks, and Net Promoter Score is a service mark, of Bain & Company, Inc., Satmetrix Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.