Venture-Based ClickFox Offers Applications Designed To Improve Automated Customer Support

Editor’s note: Atlanta Beat is a regular feature on Mondays.Startup ClickFox, an applications developer based in Atlanta, is out to improve all those self-service applications we encounter these days.

Interactive voice solutions, speech recognition, web applications, customer relationship management and more can be handled through one channel using its Customer Behavior Intelligence suite, according to ClickFox.

The package is designed to help firms who want to boost customer service.

ClickFox says one telecommunications provider has already improved customer conversion rates to pay bills online while at the same time saving $4 million.

“Customer service organizations have invested millions of dollars in customer self-service channels like interactive voice response (IVR) and web sites to serve their customers at a lower transaction cost,” said Art Schoeller, senior analyst at The Yankee Group, in a statement provided by ClickFox. “Our research indicates that one of the top spending priorities for enterprises is to optimize and extend self service capabilities so as to further reduce costs and improve customer service. At the same time a significant percentage of companies do not understand how their customers are interacting with these systems, where they fail and where they succeed.

Several Georgia Tech faculty members and researchers created ClickFox around a patent-pending technology known as VIBE. The acronym stands for visual interactive behavioral engine, which visualizes and maps user interaction across systems.

“Large financial services, telecommunications, healthcare, travel and government organizations now have the ability to see how their self-service systems perform from their customer’s perspective”, said Tal Cohen, president and CEO of ClickFox. “Using ClickFox, our customers can identify and improve interactive performance in IVR, speech, Web sites, and CRM applications and achieve multi-million dollar returns by enabling more of their customers to succeed more often in using the more cost-effective self-service channels, rather than speaking to a live agent.”

Among its features is a process that “enables companies to find problems areas and get essential information on user conversion rates through analyzing user tasks or interaction sequences. This helps organizations pinpoint drop-off points at any point in the customer transaction process and follow the ‘failures; so that business-critical scenarios can be optimized,” the company said.

Its automated optimization engine is designed to “identify immediately those application areas that are misaligned with user expectations and behaviors,” ClickFox said. “This engine compares application usage with system structure and mathematically generates robust recommendations for improvement based upon customer behavior.”

Cohen was a data-modeling expert and leading research faculty member and educator at the Georgia Tech before launching ClickFox. The company’s co-founder chief technical officer is Nissim Harel. He earned a Masters in electrical science from Georgia Tech.

ClickFox is venture funded. Investors include Cedar Fund, Delta Ventures and Veritas Venture Partners.

The company closed on a $4 million A round in January.

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