ForeSee Announces Sharp Growth
ANN ARBOR -- ForeSee, the global leader in customer experience analytics, Wednesday released an update on the close of 2011 and its plans for continued expansion and growth in 2012.
Ann Arbor-based ForeSee announced that 2011 was its 10th consecutive year of revenue growth of more than 25 percent.
"Virtually all of today's most spectacular-growth companies have a couple of things in common: they are part of the information revolution and they have developed cutting-edge technology for collecting and transmitting information," said Claes Fornell, founder of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, professor at University of Michigan, and chairman of the ForeSee board of directors. "The new phase of the information revolution is about processing -- the ability to separate the meaningful from the meaningless. That's what Foresee does with respect to customer feedback and what explains its extraordinary growth and continual promise for the future."
Added Barry Goldsmith, a ForeSee board member and general partner of Edison, N.J.-based tech investors Updata Partners: "ForeSee is positioned incredibly well for growth in 2012 and beyond. The value of ForeSee's technology and customer insights across channels in every industry is unparalleled. They are a company that owns their space."
And Noah Walley, ForeSee board member and managing director and head of technology investing with the New York City venture capital firm Investor Growth Capital, added: "We've been really excited to see the progress ForeSee has made since we first invested. It's more than quadrupled in size, significantly expanded its gross margins, and is showing increasing operating leverage. Every indication is that all three of these positive trends will continue, if not accelerate, going forward."
Product enchancements during the year included:
Multichannel Measurement : ForeSee was founded in 2001 to bring scientific measurement and analysis of the customer experience specifically to online marketing initiatives. However, ForeSee has expanded significantly beyond the online channel and now offers its customer satisfaction analytics across all touch points, including locations, contact centers, mobile experiences, and social media. The United Kingdom department store House of Fraser is one retailer that started out measuring the online customer experience with ForeSee and saw how valuable customer insights informed a site redesign that significantly increased conversion rates. As a result, House of Fraser now works with ForeSee to measure and improve satisfaction in its stores and with its contact centers.
"The customer experience across all touch points is of paramount importance to us, and it is critical that we measure in a way that provides accurate data and analysis that helps us prioritize improvements," said Robin Terrell, Executive Director of Multichannel and International at House of Fraser. "ForeSee is helping us understand how customers experience our brand across various channels and how those experiences affect sales, loyalty, recommendations, and overall satisfaction."
Expanded Mobile Capabilities : ForeSee also greatly expanded its mobile measurement capabilities in 2011 and continues to do so in 2012. ForeSee's mobile solution, the first of its kind to use a random but representative sample of visitors to mobile apps, m.mobile sites, on phone and tablet platforms, and is used by companies like ABC, ESPN, The Federal Emergency Management Agency, RIM/Blackberry, and StubHub, among many others.
"ForeSee offers ongoing measurement, so clients can see exactly what impact their mobile upgrades have on their users," said Eric Feinberg, senior director of mobile at ForeSee. "Mobile is a critical dimension to any cross-channel analysis of the customer experience because the mobile environment can either support or undermind the existing brand perception."
SessionReplay Enhancements: ForeSee has also made significant enhancements to SessionReplay, the product that allows ForeSee clients to visualize the actual experience real users have on a website within the context of satisfaction survey data, which explains what they tried to accomplish and if it was successful from their perspective.
"We've found that SessionReplay is really helpful in speeding up the identification of specific user issues," said Vijay Murali, Vice President of E-commerce Operations at Nutrisystem. "We've also found that it expedites and validates the user-driven improvements we want to make because it is such a clear indication of exactly where people are getting hung up."
Relationship-Level Measurement : In response to client demand, ForeSee has added a solution that measures satisfaction with the customer relationship across all contact channels, enabling a cumulative understanding of the health of that relationship while also identifying specific areas in which an organization is falling short.
ForeSee closed 2011 with other significant accomplishments under its belt:
* 2011 was the tenth consecutive year and 40th consecutive quarter of revenue growth of more than 25 percent while remaining cash flow positive. No single customer is more than 2.5 percent of ForeSee's overall revenues, and customer renewal rates remain over 90 percent.
* 2011 was the tenth consecutive year of job growth at ForeSee.
* Industry dominance, including more than 1000 measures. ForeSee clients include 40 of Fortune 100, 30 of the top 100 retailers, and seven of the top 10 banks.
* Government dominance, measuring more than 250 government agencies and departments.
* The introduction of the first technology that measures customer satisfaction with a mobile site or app within the experience itself using a random sampling approach and proven measurement technology.
* Improvements to SessionReplay including enhancements to its replay capabilities and increased implementation efficiency, which increase its value to clients and speed of implementation.
* Introduction of the Advanced Analytics Portal, which enables organizations to quickly analyze the customer experience, gain actionable customer insights and share a quick and easy view into the customer experience with executives.
* Nearly 80 million completed customer surveys, which is equivalent to billions of data points for thousands of companies.
* More than 80 benchmarks that allow clients to compare performance with the average performance of their peers in a variety of industries, including retail, media and entertainment, government, financial services, healthcare, b-to-b, nonprofit, pharmaceuticals, consumer products, insurance, telecommunications, utilities, content, travel and hospitality, and more.
* Global expansion and a strengthened presence in the UK.
* Customer satisfaction measures in 32 languages and more than 50 countries around the world.
* ForeSee has had a strong start to 2012, and has plans to grow revenues by 25 percent and add at least 40 new people to its staff in the coming year.
"We've made it our mission to link the customer experience to the bottom line since day one," said Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee. "The expansion and growth we've experienced over the last decade is a nice validation that we are successful in helping other companies drive future success by confidently prioritizing the efforts that they know will achieve business goals."
More at www.foresee.com.
