StepOne releases a new tool to figure out why your ‘customer service still sucks’

Like creative breadmakers, analytics firms are looking for new ways to slice their wares.

The Austin, Texas-based self-service provider StepOne is today releasing a new cloud-based product — a diagnostic tool that grabs all kinds of data and attempts to figure out why your “customer service still sucks.”

The product, called Care Profiler, takes data from such sources as call centers, customer relationship management, Web self-service, and billing systems to create a predictive model for pinpointing why certain kinds of customers have certain kinds of problems. It can integrate with StepOne’s own self-service platform, Contextual Care, or with other customer care platforms, like those from customer service provider Kana or social media marketing platform Lithium.

“If you say, ‘what is the state of your customer service today,'” many companies can’t answer that question, StepOne CEO and cofounder Alex Mitchell told VentureBeat.

“Customers get frustrated because they still can’t find what they’re looking for,” he said. Of course, frustrated customers go elsewhere.

As an example use case, he points to an unnamed cable company that used Care Profiler to pinpoint issues new customers were having in the first 72 hours after signing up, when they took home a device like a set-top box.

The cable company discovered that some of the informational material, like a sticker about connecting the box to a home Wi-Fi, was confusing. Also revealed: customers were trying to install their set-top box before they had been provisioned in the network.

Above: A data-driven screen showing a flow of events that lead to higher customer loyalty

Image Credit: StepOne

Care Profiler’s specific skill set includes finding out what kinds of content, products, or processes affect Key Performance Indicators, a measurement of how well a company is meeting its goals. There’s also the ability to determine what kind of events lead to greater customer loyalty, or what reasons are driving certain kinds of customers to call in with complaints.

While CRMs, customer service software, engagement platforms, and other solutions — including business intelligence tools — also provide data and insights into what is bothering or helping customers, Mitchell says Care Profiler is “a purpose-built insight tool” that does not have an off-the-shelf equivalent.

“We sit between a CRM and [customer service provider] Kana, and we marry those two,” Mitchell told us.

Some companies do get similar insights, he said, by using customized tools built in-house by a team of data scientists.