Touchpoint Group
The Gateway to "Real" Customer Insights

“Great customer experiences are only created when an organization has the capability and culture to embed customer insights into the critical path of its decision making,” begins Mark Thompson, COO of Touchpoint Group. But, this isn’t an easy task to accomplish, the major challenge being a general inability to decipher and contextualize what customers mean—not what they said— about their experiences and interactions, and secondly, how these insights will realistically influence the opportunities, risks, tactics, strategies, investments and ultimately all the decision an organization takes. According to Gartner, Forrester and IDC, “unstructured” data—widely accepted as the source of the highest quality customer insights—represents about 80 percent of all customer data and it is growing by around 60 percent per annum. “Add to this, existing challenges of ‘BIG DATA’ relating largely to structured and transactional customer data and it is easy to see why only a fraction of strategic, operational, marketing, and commercial decisions are steered directly by customer insights,” says Thompson.

Touchpoint Group aims to change all that.

With a 15-year history of innovation in customer engagement software including Enterprise CEM, Touchpoint Group is transforming the landscape for clients, customers, and indeed a range of complimentary software technologies through its Artificial Intelligence product Ipiphany™. Using its i³ Cognitive Analytics technology, Ipiphany™ effortlessly finds, explains and measures profound and precise customer insights that are far beyond the reach of text analytics. Unlike text analytics, i³ ingests and combines client’s customer data (structured and unstructured together), public data, and its own industry specific ontologies. Simultaneous automation of Natural Language Processing, Semantic Understanding, Machine Learning and Ongoing Knowledge Learning gives Ipiphany™ powerful pattern discovery capability that exposes the contextually accurate, highly validated and measurable customer insights on which the best decision making depends.

“For the first-time, customer experience professionals, ordinary business users and indeed analysts have the means to efficiently and confidently allow ‘the customer’ to drive the success of their organization,” says Thompson.

Consider the case of a major global bank that was experiencing customer churn from one of its term investment products. Customers of the bank were opting to not renew maturing investments, and were taking their deposits to competitors. The insights obtained internally over six weeks using a range of techniques including text analytics concluded that the problem lay at the time of maturity with the offered renewal interest rate, the recommended course of action being an increase of which would reduce customer churn at a cost of millions of dollars. Engaging with Touchpoint Group as a last step, the bank imported and re-analyzed all this customer data in Ipiphany™. In less than two days, the root cause was identified and explained—a misalignment of renewal related service communications, bank policies and timing relating to maturing investments. With this insight and confidence, the client was able to abandon their case for a rate increase and make the case instead, for changing their product marcomms as well as their customer care training and procedures. “At the ‘eleventh hour,’ our client was able to materially reduce churn and avoid eroding margin by over $10mn,” says Thompson. Being a CEM ‘vendor agnostic’ product, Ipiphany™ runs in conjunction with any other vendors’ data outputs. “For clients, this means extracting previously inaccessible ROI from the CX technologies and program investments they have already made,” says Thompson.

For the foreseeable future, Touchpoint Group plans to stay right on its mission: innovating and making customer focused AI and next generation CEM technology accessible, easy to use and efficient. “We know we have the technology to transform the industry and to give organizations unique capability to make a profound step change in CEM,” says Thompson. Touchpoint Group currently operates in North America, Canada, Australia and New Zealand and aims to serve all English-speaking markets by 2018.